For accountants and advisers
When a client says they’ll sell in a few years and the business can’t run without them, there is now somewhere to send them.
Successor.pro is the organising and implementation layer for owner-managed businesses: an AI-coached platform that does the operational preparation — documented processes, reduced owner dependency, continuity basics — and returns your client to you with a Professional Handoff Brief and the questions they should be asking you. It never gives financial, tax, legal or valuation advice.
The gap you already know
You see the owner-managed business every year, and you usually see the transition coming before the owner does. When it arrives, the work that is yours — normalising earnings, structuring the entity, planning the tax on a sale — lands on an operation that lives in the owner’s head. Pre-transaction readiness — owner-dependency, process documentation, continuity — isn’t accounting work, and the specialists who do it typically engage at five figures, which a Main-Street client rarely buys. So the file waits, and the exit you’ve watched too often follows: unprepared, discounted, or never completed.
In Canada, 76% of small-business owners intend to exit within ten years and 9% have a formal succession plan (CFIB, Succession Tsunami, 2023). In the United States, 84.6% of owners say they want help with succession and 21% say they get it from their adviser (CEG Insights, via Kitces).
What we do, and what stays with you
The division is structural, not a courtesy. The platform prepares the operation; you and the client’s other professionals do everything that is advice.
What Successor.pro does
- Owner-dependency reduction — a dependency map of what only the owner can do today, and coached work to move it.
- Process documentation — the owner’s own processes captured and written as step-by-step guides, with the owner, in sessions that fit around a working week.
- Continuity basics — who does what, an access register and a continuity plan, so a month without the owner is survivable.
- A plan that stays alive — paced to the hours the owner actually has, and re-derived as the work lands.
- The Professional Handoff Brief — the owner’s own picture, organised for you.
What stays with you
- Normalised earnings and add-backs.
- Entity and tax structuring, and the tax on any sale.
- Working capital — what a buyer would expect to stay in the business.
- Diligence-ready books, and the timeline to get there.
- Valuation, with a valuation professional — and the transaction itself.
We do the grinding, unbillable work — months of it — so that when the file reaches you, it is a file.
What your client brings back to you
When the operational work is done, the platform assembles a Professional Handoff Brief: the business and the owner’s situation as they reported it, a risk picture from the completed work, and one section per professional with the questions the owner should bring to each. Every figure in it is the owner’s own estimate and is labelled as one; the platform computes nothing and values nothing.
For the accountant, these are the questions the platform generates — word for word, from the same question bank the product uses:
- “What would my books look like to a buyer’s accountant today — and what would it take to make them diligence-ready?”on every Brief
- “What’s the realistic timeline to get my books to a state that would survive a buyer’s diligence?”
- “Based on how the business actually runs, what would a normalized earnings figure look like, versus what shows on my tax return?”on every Brief
- “Are there personal expenses running through the business that would count as add-backs in a sale?”on every Brief
- “How should I think about working capital — what would a buyer expect to stay in the business?”
- “Is my entity setup something you’d flag for a structuring conversation with a tax specialist — better early than late?”
- “Given where the business is financially right now, what would a buyer make of it — and what would you want to see changed before I take it to market?”
Those marked appear on every Brief; the rest appear when the owner’s answers call for them.
Open an example Brief for an invented businessThe whole document, as your client would bring it. Prints to a page.
Planners, lawyers and brokers
The Brief carries a section for each professional the owner’s situation calls for — the financial planner’s on the owner’s stated Number, income reliance and timeline; the lawyer’s, the valuation professional’s and the M&A adviser’s on what their part of the work needs to know. The same rules apply to every one of you: we pay no referral fees, we give no advice, and the owner arrives prepared.
Why it’s safe to refer
The advice boundary is structural. The platform never values the business, never gives financial, legal, or tax advice, never opines on whether plans add up. At every such boundary it names the professional the question belongs to. It cannot wander into your lane — by design, not by disclaimer.
We pay no referral fees. Ever. Your recommendation stays a recommendation — no compensation flows to you in cash or kind, so there is nothing to disclose and nothing to weigh against your judgment. We state our policy plainly and leave its assessment to you, under whatever rules govern your practice — our side of the bargain is building a platform that deserves to be referrable.
Data handling in plain English, published and current. Deletion on request; client data is never sold, shared, or used for pricing. Your data & our boundaries.
A young company, honestly presented. One founder, no enterprise theater. The one-pager below is written for your compliance file — what it is, what it never does, how data is handled, how we make money.
What we ask of you
Nothing to sign, nothing to install, nothing to pay. When a client fits — a few years out, and the business still runs through them — send them to successor.pro: they pick the road that sounds like them and get started free — about fifteen minutes, the result on screen. Successor.pro is in private beta; there’s no charge for a place, and nothing for your client to pay at any point in what you’ve just read.
The link to forward: successor.pro
If you’d rather see it first, Matt will show you what your client sees — ten minutes, one to one.
Written for your compliance file. or read it in your browser.
Talk to the founder — matt@successor.pro