A Job That Owns A Building

Five questions separate a sellable machine shop from a very expensive hobby. Most owners have never been asked any of them.

Here is a test you can run this afternoon without opening QuickBooks. If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, could your shop run for ninety days without you? Not limp along. Run. Take orders, quote jobs, ship parts, collect payment. If the answer is no, you don't have a sellable business. You have a job that owns a building.

That's the first of five questions, and only about one in nine shops that go to market can answer enough of them. The others aren't unlucky. They're unsellable, and nobody ever told the owner why. The broker won't tell you, because the listing fee clears either way. Your CPA won't tell you, because minimizing taxes was the assignment and hiding profit does exactly that. Your family won't tell you, because they've watched you give this place thirty years and nobody wants to be the one who says the thing.

The other four questions cover your books, your customer list, your key people, and the one nobody expects: what you'd actually do on a Tuesday morning if the shop weren't yours. That last one has killed more signed deals than any bank. Owners with fair offers on the table find reasons to delay, add conditions, negotiate in bad faith. Not because the deal is wrong. Because signing means becoming someone they've never been.

THE COMPANION TOOL, FREE: THE READINESS RECKONING

Twelve taps, no financials disclosed. The verdict on whether your shop can sell, and the multiple a bank-financed buyer could pay.

Run it now at cncstrategies.us/reckoning

We built the five questions into a tool, and then we went further: seven more taps derive the multiple a bank-financed buyer could actually pay for your shop, straight from today's SBA lending math, the same amortization table a lender will run when a real buyer brings your deal in. You never type a dollar amount. You get a verdict stamp and a multiple, and you do the valuation math in your own head, where nobody's watching.

If you've already run it, here's what your stamp means. SELL-READY isn't a suggestion to sell, it's a position to protect while you decide what you want. IN THE GAP is where businesses quietly lose value while their owners tell themselves there's still plenty of time, and everything dragging your score down is listed on your nonconformance report in order. NOT READY isn't an insult, it's a starting point, and most of what's broken can be fixed in twelve to twenty-four months of deliberate work. The fix order matters: trend first, then owner dependence, then concentration, then the books. That sequence is the book.