I've helped prepare three companies for sale. I've been the buyer evaluating eight others. The sellers who got the best outcomes — cleanest processes, fewest surprises, strongest valuations — had one thing in common: they started preparing their IT infrastructure before they hired the banker.
Not during due diligence. Before.
Document everything that matters.
This sounds obvious. It isn't. I mean: an actual written record of your core systems, their configurations, their dependencies, their vendor contracts, and the name of the person responsible for each one. A network diagram. An asset inventory. A list of every SaaS tool you pay for and what it costs.
Acquirers ask for this in the first week of due diligence. If you have to build it under deadline, you will miss things. Things you miss become findings. Findings become either deal adjustments or problems. Neither is where you want to be.
Get your security posture to a defensible baseline.
You don't need to be perfect. You need to be defensible. That means: MFA enforced everywhere that matters, email domain protection in place (DMARC, DKIM, SPF — configured and monitored, not just deployed), endpoint management on company devices, and a basic incident response plan that someone has actually read.
If you've never had an outside firm do a vulnerability assessment, do one. The cost is a rounding error against your deal value. The findings give you either a clean bill of health to show the buyer, or a remediation list you can execute before the process starts.
Know your vendor contracts.
Pull every material SaaS and software agreement. Identify the ones with change-of-control provisions. For each one, understand: does this auto-terminate? Does it trigger a renegotiation right? Does the pricing change?
Some of these you can renegotiate before the sale to remove the clause. Some you can't. But knowing which is which before you're in due diligence is the difference between a manageable conversation and a deal-stage surprise.
Address the technical debt you've been deferring.
There is always technical debt. The question is whether it's the kind that a buyer can accept (legacy systems still running because they work and migration is low priority) or the kind that signals operational risk (a critical system running on unsupported infrastructure with no backup, held together by one person).
Buyers discount for visible technical debt. They price aggressively for technical debt that looks unmanaged or undisclosed. The difference matters at the valuation stage.
Think about what the first 90 days look like for the buyer.
If you were buying your company, what would worry you about running it? The systems you'd be nervous about. The processes that depend on people you might lose. The integrations that nobody fully understands.
Address what you can. Document what you can't. Come to the process ready to explain your infrastructure honestly — including the gaps — and with a clear picture of what it takes to operate it. That's the conversation that builds confidence, even when the stack isn't perfect.
The goal isn't to show a buyer something that doesn't exist. It's to make sure the real story of your technology is one you control, not one they discover.
Start 12 months before you think you'll go to market. Six months is doable. Ninety days is damage control.