How a deal runs
This is the process I follow with every seller. It is modelled on how a good sell-side broker runs a business sale: inventory, rights, presentation, competing offers, terms, close.
- Qualify. You fill in the intake: systems, counts, years, where the data lives, who owns it, whether outcomes are recorded. Ten minutes. I reply within one business day with a yes, a no, or the two questions that decide it.
- Technical walk-through. Thirty minutes on a call. I map how work moves through your tools: where a request starts, where it gets discussed, where the decision lands, where it closes. The chain is what buyers price.
- Rights check. You own your operating record. You do not own what you hold for clients under a master agreement. We separate the two and read your customer terms for de-identified-use language. This is the step that quietly kills the most deals, so it comes early.
- Organize and present. I write a one-page summary: what it is, how big, how many years, which systems, what outcomes it carries, rights status, what is excluded. No files leave you.
- Buyers compete. The summary goes to the buyers asking for your industry this month. I know who that is because they tell their referrers. You see every offer side by side.
- Negotiate. Price, exclusivity term, scope of use, one-off or ongoing, handling and deletion rules, liability. Never perpetual. If you are planning to sell the company, the term ends before your exit.
- De-identify. A third-party vendor takes the export, swaps names, emails, phones and account numbers for stable pseudonyms, keeps the relationships, holds raw files about a week, deletes them. You review a sample. Finance and legal records can be done on your premises at higher cost.
- Deliver and accept. The buyer receives the de-identified package and has an acceptance window written into the license.
- Get paid. On the terms in the license. The buyers I work with pay between a week and sixty days after acceptance. Finder's fee comes from the buyer. Advisory fee, if any, was agreed with you at step four.
What can kill a deal
- Phone-first operations. The record reads "ticket opened, ticket closed" with nothing in between.
- A software switch in the last three years. The scorable history starts there.
- A missing core system. No chat export, email retention switched off, CRM purged.
- Client-held data under a master agreement.
- Records in a language the de-identification tooling does not yet handle well.
- A seller who wants to do the de-identification themselves. It breaks the relationships and the value.
- Padding. One broker shipped a folder with four thousand copies of a film in it to look big. The lab opened it.
What I will not do
- Take custody of your raw data.
- Sign you to a perpetual license.
- Quote you a number before a buyer has looked.
- Send anything to a buyer you have not approved.