Most leaders preparing to sell think about the numbers first.
Revenue, margins, contracts, the story that gets told in the data room.

Fewer think about the culture, which is strange, because increasingly, buyers do.

I worked with a thirty-person facilities business a few years back. It had fast growth and an eager team, but no defined values guiding how decisions got made day to day. Good people, unclear what mattered most and how to act and support one another. We worked together and fixed that, not with a poster on the wall, but by embedding values into how people were led, hired and rewarded.

A healthy culture isn’t a nice-to-have before a sale. It’s part of what’s being sold.

Trust built and the team steadied. The story the business could tell about itself got stronger, and so did the business itself.

That business was acquired, with some people staying for a new chapter, while others naturally moved on.

I don’t think the acquisition was a coincidence.

Organisations that treat culture as part of their working DNA, not an afterthought, are eleven times more likely to outperform their peers after a sale or merger.

A team who trust their leadership, who know what the place stands for, is worth more than a spreadsheet can capture. Buyers know it too. They’re not only checking the numbers add up, they’re also checking whether the people will stay once they do. And those numbers will show in your churn and absence record, a different data set, but just as invaluable.

What a healthy culture is made of

When I talk about culture, I don’t mean a mission statement or a wellbeing survey. I mean four things working together.

1. Values, what people genuinely believe, not what’s on the wall.
2. Behaviours, how that belief shows up in daily decisions.
3. Experience, the systems around people, onboarding, rewards, how work actually feels at all levels.
4. Care, whether people feel like they matter, not just included.

Get those four working together, and culture stops being a slide in a deck. It becomes the heartbeat of the organisation, quietly running underneath everything else, including whether a sale goes well.

A slightly different route, but the same lesson

I’ve also sat with a leadership team going through a very different transition with a pharma company. An Employee Ownership Trust, where the question wasn’t who’s buying us, but how do we make this change together, so everyone has a genuine stake in what happens next.

I spent time interviewing the whole team, from production operators and quality control to the directors, understanding what was really going on beneath the surface, then playing that back honestly to leadership. It wasn’t the founder cashing out to a stranger, or a private equity firm optimising for exit. It was the people doing the work, today and preparing for after the founder was gone, that was the question the transition forced them to sit with.

An EOT isn’t just a legal structure change. It’s a business deciding, on paper, who it belongs to and how they act as one.

What I gave them was a clear read on where the gaps were and a platform to start closing them over time, using GITs, setting goals, measuring the impact, and having clear tasks to get there. That’s a genuine shift in how a leadership team thinks, even before it’s fully lived out day to day at all levels.

The bit most deals skip

Culture isn’t separate from the commercial story. It’s underneath it, holding the rest of it up. Ignore it before a sale, and you’re not protecting value, you’re hoping nobody looks too closely.

If you’re heading toward a sale, or just wondering where the business is going in the next few years, the honest question is simple: would your culture hold up if someone looked properly.

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