“We give this away because it's too much work to sell”
A Report They Gave Away Became a $1.2M a Year Product
Turned a hand-written exit-readiness report into an AI-scored assessment an M&A advisory firm now sells on its own, at more than 20 a month.
“We're not going to make a lot of money on these. They're just to weed out people who'd never hire us.”
Who they are
A lower-middle-market mergers and acquisitions advisory firm, fifteen years in business and almost entirely referral-driven. Its clients are business owners approaching the biggest transaction of their lives, most of them for the first time.
What was going wrong
The firm sold an exit-readiness assessment for $4,000 to $5,000, but not as a product. It existed to separate serious sellers from tire-kickers. In the founder’s own words: “We’re not going to make a lot of money on them. It’s more just to weed out people who would never hire us.”
The reason it could not be a product was the labor behind it. Each report meant an analyst copying survey answers into slides and triggering AI analysis one cell at a time — six to ten hours per client. That ceiling capped the firm at two or three reports a month, which is not a business line. It is a filter that happens to cost money.
What we built
We built an engine that scores a 35-question seller intake across revenue quality, financials, owner dependency and other dimensions, then writes per-section narratives from a valuation advisor’s point of view.
From those scores it synthesizes a company-wide SWOT, labeled risk clusters rated by buyer risk, a prioritized 12-24 month action plan, and a phased value-creation roadmap. A form-submit pipeline runs the whole analysis automatically and emails the firm when a report is ready.
The last step is deliberate: a human reviews every report before a client sees it. The system removes the copying, not the judgment.
What happened
Report production fell from a full workday to two or three hours. That reduction is the entire story, because it is what made volume possible.
The assessment is now sold as a stand-alone product at $5,000 a time, more than 20 times a month — over $100,000 a month, a run-rate above $1.2M a year that did not exist before.
The second-order effect matters more to the firm. Clients who go through the assessment convert into full advisory engagements 75% more often than before, at an average commission of roughly $150,000 a deal. The thing built to filter clients turned out to be the thing that wins them.
The next step is moving the tool off spreadsheets and onto its own web app, clearing the last manual bottleneck in the pipeline.
