Business succession › Handover check
Your business should go to good hands. Is it ready?
If you want to hand over or sell your business in a few years, you are deciding the price today. The handover check shows you what makes your business valuable to a successor, what holds it back and what you should do before the handover.
The situation
There are more businesses than successors
In Austria, around 51,500 businesses with employees face a possible handover between 2020 and 2029. In 2023, trade and craft businesses accounted for the largest share of takeovers, at 29%. In Germany, the IfM Bonn expects around 186,000 handovers between 2026 and 2030.
Buyers, meanwhile, are becoming scarce. In the succession advice of the German chambers of industry and commerce, around 9,600 companies face only about 4,000 interested parties. If you want to sell, you are competing – and what sells first is what pays off for the successor and their bank.
Sources (in German): WKÖ, based on KMU Forschung Austria (2024) · WKÖ (2023) · IfM Bonn (2025) · DIHK report on business succession 2025
What matters
What a buyer checks – and what their bank checks
A successor rarely buys with their own money alone. They need a bank to finance the purchase price. And the bank looks at three things long before machinery and vehicles come up.
Earnings
Does the profit carry the purchase price?
The value of a business depends on its sustainable profit. Every hour needlessly lost in the office is missing there.
Independence
Does the business run without you?
If quotes, prices and customer knowledge exist only in your head, the successor is buying a risk. Nothing pushes the price down more.
Order
Are figures and processes easy to follow?
Clean, digital records shorten the due diligence and make financing easier. Whatever is missing or out of date, the buyer deducts from the price.
A worked example
What this can mean when you sell
An electrical contractor with twelve employees and an adjusted annual profit of €150,000. Once as it runs today. Once ready for handover: digital processes in the office, knowledge documented, no investment backlog.
Without preparation
A lot depends on the boss
Profit €150,000, multiple 3.0. Minus €30,000 for deferred investment.
€420,000
possible price
Ready for handover
The business runs without him
Profit €156,000 thanks to a lighter office workload, multiple 3.5 because the risk for the buyer falls. No deduction.
€546,000
possible price
Example calculation with simplified assumptions: value equals sustainable profit times multiple. The multiples are for illustration and are not market values. A real valuation is always done case by case. Often the biggest difference is a different one: that a buyer can be found at all and that their bank will finance the deal.
How it works
How the handover check works
A preliminary conversation, one day in your business, a written evaluation. You need to prepare nothing except the figures for the last three years.
01 · Before
Preliminary conversation
Half an hour by phone or video. We clarify your timetable, your ideas about succession and which documents you should have ready.
02 · On site
One day in your business
I look at the figures, the office and the processes and talk to you and your key people. The business carries on as normal.
03 · Afterwards
Written evaluation
Within ten working days you receive the evaluation: what is holding back your value, a rough indication of value and a roadmap up to the handover.
04 · Review
Your roadmap, point by point
We go through the evaluation together. Then you decide whether and how to continue – with me or without me.
Why a banker
I see your business through the eyes of the bank
With Slotta Consulting, I run a boutique for transformation and implementation. In the financial sector since 1990 · more than 20 years of leadership responsibility. I know which questions a bank asks before it finances a purchase price, and where businesses give away value in the process.
I look at things as someone who gets them done: I do not just tell you what is missing, but what to tackle in which order – and what you can safely leave alone.
For tax, contracts and the search for a buyer, I work with experienced tax advisers, lawyers and M&A specialists from my network. On request, I make the introduction so that you do not start from scratch.
Scope and price
What the handover check costs
In Austria and Germany there are funding programmes for consulting and digitalisation in small and mid-sized businesses, depending on the federal state and the project. Whether and which funding could apply to your business, we clarify in the first conversation.
For your business
Handover check
Preliminary conversation, one day on site, written evaluation and review of the roadmap.
€4,500
Fixed price
Who it is for
Owner-managed businesses
Trade businesses with employees whose owners want to hand over or sell in the next five to ten years.
Confidential
Nothing leaves the room
What I see in your business stays with you. On request, I sign a confidentiality agreement in advance.
Prices for businesses, net plus VAT. Travel costs as receipted. Fixed prices for engagements commissioned by 31 January 2027, prices as of October 2026. Errors and omissions excepted; subject to change. Only the written proposal is binding. All fees and terms at a glance →
Any questions about handing over a trade business, the process, costs or timing?
Straight talk
When you do not need a handover check
The handover is less than two years away
Then there is too little time for a roadmap, and the focus is the handover itself. If the sale is already under way, I can, on request, hold the first conversations with prospective buyers or sit at the table with you. That way, in the end you only negotiate with buyers who are serious and can finance the deal. Raise it with me directly in the first conversation.
Your successor is settled and knows the business
If a son, daughter or long-standing employee takes over and the figures are in order, a single conversation about the order of the steps is often enough.
Who is behind this:
Thirty minutes to find out whether the check is right for you
In the first conversation, you describe where your business stands and when you want to hand over. I tell you whether a handover check is worthwhile for you and whether funding could apply. Free of charge and with no obligation.