You Already Know Which Owners Aren't Ready to Sell
Most owners who call you are exit-minded but not exit-ready. We close that gap before they hit your desk, and turn the rest into recurring revenue for you.
Schedule a ConversationYou Know Exactly Why 80% of Your Pipeline Goes Nowhere
You've seen it a hundred times. Owner says they want to sell. You do the meeting. You start digging, and within five minutes, you know.
The books are a mess. Operations are founder-dependent. Revenue is lumpy. There's no process. The business is worth a fraction of what the owner thinks it is.
It's not that these are bad businesses. Some of them are solid. The owners are exit-minded. They're just not exit-ready. Not for your listing criteria. Not for any buyer's due diligence. And the time you spend qualifying and re-qualifying them is time you're not closing real deals.
What's Actually Clogging Your Deal Flow
The owner's a bottleneck. Remove them and the whole thing goes sideways. Financial reporting is inconsistent at best, fictional at worst. "Systems" means a notebook in the owner's head, nothing anyone else could run. There's customer concentration with a big chunk of revenue tied to one or two relationships. The owner wants to sell at a valuation that only exists in their imagination. There's no management layer. Remove the owner and the team can't function.
None of this is news to you. The frustrating part is you can't fix any of these things from a brokerage position. You're filtering, not fixing. So you filter out 80% of what comes through the door and work with what's left.
What If Every Owner You Talked to Actually Fit Your Listing Criteria?
Every exit-minded owner who's not exit-ready represents two lost opportunities: the deal you could have closed if the business was ready, and the referral revenue you left on the table because there was nowhere useful to send them.
It doesn't have to work like that.
We take the businesses that aren't ready (the ones that need 12 to 36 months of work to be sellable) and we do the operational heavy lifting. Here's what we actually fix:
Accountability systems.
Every company needs someone other than the owner calling the shots on the daily. We build that structure: decision rights, management layers, and operating rhythms that work without the founder.
Automated operating systems.
The stuff that's in the owner's head gets documented, systematized, and handed to a team that can run it. This is the difference between a business that sells and one that collapses during due diligence.
If the business has enough potential to be worth your time down the road, we're happy to do the work that gets it there. You send us the conversation that's not ready. We send back a business that is.
Turn Dead Pipeline Into Recurring Revenue
Right now, when a business doesn't fit your criteria, you politely pass and move on. That owner's still out there, exit-minded and stuck. They're going to try to sell it themselves, fail, and come back in two years still not exit-ready.
But it doesn't have to be dead pipeline. A simple referral to Diffactory turns those conversations into recurring referral revenue for you. We pay flat referral fees for qualified introductions. That dead pipeline is now income.
Think about that for a second. The businesses you say no to right now could be the businesses you say yes to in 18 months, and in the meantime, you're generating referral revenue instead of just losing the lead.
And here's the real payoff: the same businesses you refer out today come back 12 to 18 months later, ready to actually list. You referred a founder who wasn't ready, we did the work, and now you've got a sellable business walking back through your door. That's not a maybe. That's how the program works.
Two Ways This Makes Your Life Better
1. We Screen. You Close.
You stop spending time on initial intake, validation, and owners who aren't ready. We handle the operational assessment and pre-qualification, and when a business is actually worth your time, we send it to you ready to go.
When your pipeline comes to us (or you send us an owner who's not ready yet), we run them through the Value Builder assessment process and either confirm they're ready or tell them what needs to happen first.
The pre-screening is complimentary. A referral fee is only earned if it turns into something real.
2. You Build Your Future Pipeline.
The businesses you can't list right now? They're not lost anymore. They're in our program, getting built into something you can actually sell in 12 to 18 months.
Keep track of their progress. When you're ready, they're ready. The value drivers that were broken when you first met? Fixed. The owner dependency? Addressed. The financials? Clean.
That's a sellable business. The referral structure is designed to turn your "no" into a future "yes," and to put money in your pocket along the way.
Frequently Asked
Your Pipeline Is Leaking Revenue. Let's Fix That.
Tell us what you're dealing with. All it takes is one email to see exactly what the referral program looks like, how the screening and pre-qualification process works, and how much of that dead pipeline could be generating monthly income instead.