What happens between opening the link and holding a buyer-ready playbook — and what each session is trying to get out of your head.
The landing page. Read the pitch and put in your email.Ten seconds. Every button on the page is the same door.
The welcome email. One button — Start your playbook — signs you in directly. There is no password, ever.Links work once; opening an old one from a new device simply sends you a fresh one.
Intake. The basics: what the business does, who works there, rough revenue and typical job, where you operate, when you plan to hand over — and your top clients and key people by name.About ten minutes, and the interview never asks you to repeat any of it.
Session one. A guided interview, one question at a time, starting from your named clients. The progress bar fills only when an answer is usable by a stranger — not merely mentioned.30–45 minutes. Leave anytime; it resumes exactly where you stopped, and every answer is saved the moment you send it.
“Write up this section.” A minute later you see the section’s shape: the situation pages it drafted and the questions still open, marked being checked.No rule is shown until a human reviewer has verified it against your own quoted words.
Review. Usually under a day. Then the section appears in full: numbered rules carrying your own words, each labelled honestly — owner said, said when asked, or worked out — check.Open gaps are listed, never guessed at.
Sessions two through four, same rhythm — plus gap recovery: questions from earlier sections resurface naturally, and answers flow back to the section they belong to.Most owners finish all four across two weeks.
Contributors, optional. Send any section by link to a named person — a manager, a bookkeeper. Their answers carry their name, and a disagreement is recorded as both accounts plus a flag.Nothing is ever silently resolved in anyone’s favour.
The finished playbook. The last approval adds the opening page: an executive summary with the numbers a buyer asks first, and any cross-section contradictions surfaced as open questions. On screen, and as a PDF.Yours to send to a buyer, a broker — or nobody yet.
Client Map & Exceptions
Who actually pays the bills: the top accounts and what each is worth, the real contact at each and how they like to be reached, who gets treated differently and by how much, who could be lost and why, where new work comes from, how onboarding and unhappy clients are handled — and the history a stranger could step on without knowing.
Pricing Framework
The formula a stranger could quote from tomorrow: the base rate and what it’s per, how price moves by job and customer, the floor that’s never crossed, how a quote gets built and sent, how raises land on existing clients, what’s billed on top versus absorbed, who may give a discount — and what happens when someone doesn’t pay.
Vendors & Suppliers · Daily Workflows
The dependency map: suppliers the business can’t run without, negotiated terms and who holds them, anything single-sourced, who gets called when a delivery fails, where the accounts and paperwork live, and the subcontractor bench.
Then the operating rhythm: how a day starts, how work is assigned and handed from person to person, what happens when a job goes wrong mid-day, what “finished” means, what gets written down — and the weekly and monthly cycle of invoicing, payroll, and ordering.
People & Roles · Unwritten Rules
The authority map: who does what and answers to whom, what each person may decide alone, what only the owner decides, who covers absences, who’d be hardest to replace, and how hiring, pay, and discipline actually work.
Then the part a buyer really pays for: promises kept off the contract, the never-dos with particular clients, favours carried for relationship reasons, how complaints truly get handled, what the reputation rests on — and what you’d warn a successor about on day one.
The Starter playbook compresses this to two sittings: your clients, then your money and suppliers.
No card, no commitment — you’ll be answering the first question ten minutes from now.