Published June 27, 2026 · Updated August 21, 2026
Pedro Oliveira, Founder & Principal, Renova Strategy
It’s not to a business broker. It’s not to a friend who sold their company a few years ago. It’s to your accountant.
I know that’s not the exciting answer. But after going through acquisitions on both sides of the table, and working with business owners at every stage of that process, it’s the one I keep coming back to.
The short answer from people who’ve been through it? Your accountant should be involved from the very beginning. Ideally two years before you go to market.
The consensus among experienced sellers and advisors is pretty clear: bring your accountant in early, before you talk to brokers, before you start thinking about valuations, and well before you’re under any pressure to close a deal.
On a recent transaction, the accountant was the first call. They helped fill in the blanks for the broker’s team, then handled the year-end tax return and capital gains. Clean, sequential, no scrambling. That’s how it’s supposed to work. The problem is that most sellers don’t do it that way.
Here’s something worth being honest about. Your accountant may not be an M&A specialist. Many aren’t. And you shouldn’t be asking them what your business is worth. Valuation is a different skill set, and leaning on your accountant for a number can give you a false sense of what the market will actually pay.
What they can do, and what makes them invaluable early in the process, is help you understand the financial reality of your business and get it into a state where it can withstand scrutiny.
Buyers are going to look hard at your books. Their team is going to have questions, and they’re going to want answers from someone who knows the numbers intimately. The earlier your accountant knows a sale is coming, the earlier they can start identifying what needs to be cleaned up, clarified, or documented before due diligence begins.
That preparation work matters more than most sellers realize. Clean numbers, clear adjustments, and organized financials don’t just make the process smoother. They affect both the price you get and the probability that a deal actually closes.
Clean financials are one piece of the readiness puzzle, but they’re not the whole picture. Experienced buyers and advisors will also be looking at things your accountant can’t fix for you: owner dependency, systems and processes, staff capability, customer concentration, the strength of your contracts, and whether the business can actually run without you holding it together.
That’s why two years is not an exaggeration. Getting a business genuinely ready for sale, in a way that maximizes value and actually transfers well, takes time. The accountant is one important part of that, but the preparation goes broader than the numbers.
None of this is an argument against working with a broker. A good broker brings real value, market knowledge, buyer relationships, deal structure experience, and the ability to run a competitive process. Some brokers even have accountants on their team who can help package the deal effectively.
The point isn’t to choose between your accountant and a broker. It’s to get the foundations right before you bring anyone else into the picture. Once the sale becomes urgent, there’s far less room to fix the issues that affect value.
Start with your accountant. Give them enough lead time to actually help you. Don’t ask them what the business is worth, but do ask them what a buyer is going to find when they look under the hood, and what you can do about it now.
Then, when the time is right, bring in the right broker for the transaction.
That sequence gives you the best chance of not just closing a deal, but closing the right deal at the right price. If you want help thinking through where your business stands before any of those conversations happen, that’s exactly what we do at Renova Strategy.
If you want to talk through where your business stands, that is exactly what we do.