- Buyers pay for a company they can run, not a company they have to rebuild.
- What transfers: data you own, workflows that are not tribal, knowledge not trapped in 11 logins.
- PE will move you onto better systems anyway. Showing up organized changes the price.
Buyers pay for a company they can run. Owned, modernized infrastructure usually means better margins and a cleaner look-back. That is not a slogan. It is how diligence actually reads a stack.
Raphael Bennett, Co-Founder and Principal at REV Global: the stack is now a lever. Not an IT chore. A valuation input. That is why REV looks at the stack before talking about a sale. This is part seven of UnSaaSing in practice, and it sits next to Day 1, not month 18 and twelve months before you sell.
Buyers pay for a company they can run
Two companies with similar revenue get two very different offers when one of them is a bundle of logins and tribal knowledge. The rented stack transfers as an obligation. The owned stack transfers as an asset. We made that split in the leaky bucket. At the table, it shows up as price.
What transfers
- Data you actually own.
- Workflows that are not tribal.
- Knowledge not trapped in 11 logins.
If the customer history lives in a founder's inbox and three CRMs, the buyer is not buying a company. They are buying a rebuild, and they will discount for it. If the workflow runs on rails the company owns, the buyer can operate on Monday.
The stack is a lever
PE is going to move you onto better systems anyway. Showing up already organized changes what they will pay to get there. You cannot install that in the last 90 days before a process. You build it the way this series describes: one product, in parallel, on a timeline you can defend.
See the stack the way a buyer will. That is the last move before we talk about what happens when we start.
UnSaaSing in practice, part 7 of 8. Previous: The Biggest Mistake Companies Make When They UnSaaS · Next: What Happens When We Start