Is Your Business Sellable? The Commercial Audit
Is Your Business Sellable? The Commercial Audit
The Revenue Room | Session 03 | Thursday 21 May | 4pm BST | Online
Most founders with an exit in mind are focused on the wrong things.
They're thinking about valuation multiples, EBITDA, and finding the right advisor. All of that matters. But the thing that actually determines whether a deal completes, and at what price, is something most founders haven't spent enough time on.
It's the commercial layer. And in most founder-led businesses, it has a problem.
The pipeline depends on the founder. The relationships belong to the founder. The revenue works, but only because the founder is working.
Buyers see this immediately. Their advisors are trained to find it. And when they do, it costs you in valuation, in deal structure, in earnout conditions, sometimes in the deal itself.
Session 03 of The Revenue Room is built around one question: is your business actually sellable right now — and if not, what needs to change?
What we'll cover
We'll work through the three things buyers and their advisors actually look at when assessing a founder-led business:
Whether revenue works without the founder in the room not occasionally, but consistently and systemically.
Whether the founder can explain the commercial system, not just the results who does what, where deals come from, what conversion looks like at each stage.
Whether the founder has already let go of being the answer to client problems, commercial decisions, and team uncertainty.
We'll be honest about where most founder-led businesses sit against these three things, and what the realistic path looks like to close the gaps.
Special guest
This session we'll be joined by several very special guests, including Paul Cooper, Non-Executive Director and former advisor to growth companies with over 30 years in M&A transactions across Tech, Agency and adjacent businesses.
As well as a founder who grew and sold their business, taking revenue to £30m.
They'll be sharing what the exit process actually looked like from the inside: what they got right, what caught them off guard, and what they'd tell a founder earlier in the journey.
How it works
The Revenue Room is a monthly peer group for founders and revenue leaders in founder-led tech and digital businesses. It runs online, lasts 60 minutes, and is built around honest conversation, not presentations, not pitches, not someone selling something from the front of the room.
Each session has a focused topic. Everyone who attends is working through a version of the same problem. The format is designed to get as many voices in the room as possible, as quickly as possible.
Previous sessions have covered pipeline slowdowns and existing customer growth. This is session three in a three-part arc focused on building revenue that works and is sellable.
Who this is for
Founder-CEOs of tech and digital product businesses, typically 5 to 50 people, who are still driving a significant proportion of their own revenue and are starting to think about what comes next — whether that's scaling, stepping back, or building toward an exit.
If you're not there yet on the exit question, this session is still worth your time. The commercial layer we'll be discussing is the same thing that determines whether you can scale without burning out not just whether you can sell.
Hosted by
Simon Watson — 3x founder, 3x exit. I help founder-led tech and digital businesses build the commercial layer that makes them scalable and sellable. I've taken businesses to NYSE IPO, built and sold a B2B agency, and most recently exited Realtime Agency to VC-backed AI company Pixis.
Website: https://revenueandbeyond.com/