Arbor Portal shows you how a buyer will view your business and gives you a plan to raise what it's worth.

An independent look at your company from the buyer's seat: what they would see, what they would question, and what would change their mind.

Get the buyer's view while you can still act on it.

Request the Buyer's View How it works

Trained at Morgan Stanley, Apax, and Elliott.

What preparation is worth

With preparation and positioning Without preparation

Once you decide to sell your business and engage a broker, you are committed to a timeline and unable to make meaningful changes without putting your deal at risk.

The Buyer's View helps you identify the decisions you can make now, before a deal is under consideration, that will strengthen your position at the negotiating table should you decide to sell or raise outside capital.

What it is

How a buyer would see your business today and what would change that view before you ever go to market.

Not a broker inflating a number to win a mandate. Not a buyer negotiating for a lower price to boost their own returns. An honest assessment from someone with no stake in the outcome.

What's inside

A view, a model, and a roadmap, all from the buyer's side.

A written view of your business, what is working and what is not A model for how a buyer will value your business and what moves the price A ranked list of the factors that can increase your value A prioritized roadmap: what to address and when The fluency to see your business the way a buyer does

See how it works

From the buyer's seat

Fifteen years on the buy side, working with management teams to get deals done. The same judgment a buyer brings to the table, now on your side.

Your goals and timeline, no one else's

The objective of working with Arbor Portal is to improve your business. With no financial incentive to convince you to sell or to follow a certain timeline, we can have a candid conversation about the best path for you and your business.

You learn to see it too

You come away able to see your business the way a buyer would, so nothing in a future process catches you off guard.

Most owners think about this long before they call anyone.

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The Buyer's View

What it is, how it runs, and what you receive.

When a buyer's team weighs a business, they form a view of it: what is strong, what is risky, and what would have to change before they would pay up. You never see the one they form about you. The Buyer's View gives you that perspective on your own company, in writing and in a working session, plus the ability to see your business that way yourself long after the engagement ends. It is not a scorecard or a valuation certificate. It is the judgment of someone who has sat in the buyer's seat.

The process

Four phases, kept short and light on your team.

Phase 1 · Week 1

Intake

You share your financials and a short list of key materials through a secure, private workspace. We have one kickoff conversation about the business and what you want from it, whenever that may be. The demand on you and your team is light by design.

Phase 2 · Weeks 1–3

Review and model

I review the business the way a buyer's team would and build the model of how a buyer would value it. This is where the work happens, mostly on my side, with the occasional targeted question rather than a standing demand on your time.

Phase 3 · Week 3–4

Working session

We sit down together. I walk you through what I found, and through how a buyer sees and values a business like yours. We run the growth and margin scenarios so you can see, directly, how the story moves the number a buyer will defend. You leave able to run the model yourself.

Phase 4 · Week 4

The written view

You receive the written assessment, the model, a ranked view of what caps your value, and a prioritized roadmap. We talk through it so the path forward is clear. Follow-up sessions are available as you work the roadmap, on your schedule.

What you receive

What stays with you.

The written view

A written assessment of your business from the buyer's point of view: what they would find compelling, what they would question, and what would make them hesitate or pull back on price.

The pricing model

A model of how a buyer would actually price the business, with the growth and margin scenarios that move the number. Delivered and walked through, so you can run it yourself rather than take my word for it.

What caps your value

The specific things a buyer would discount or use against you, ranked in the order a buyer would weigh them, not a flat checklist treating everything as equal.

The roadmap

Prioritized, sequenced actions: what is worth addressing before any process, what can wait, and what each one is likely worth.

Fluency

You do not just get a document. You come away able to see your own business the way a buyer's team does, which is the part that keeps paying off in every conversation that follows, including with your own advisors.

Why this is different

Judgment from the buyer's seat, not a score from a formula.

A real artifact, not a scorecard

What you get is the actual document the other side produces, not an invented framework or a score normalized into a formula.

Judgment, shown

I tell you what a buyer would conclude, in plain terms, with the reasoning visible. No black box.

The principal does the work

You work directly with the person who did this work on the buy side, not a team running you through a process.

Built to teach, not to grade

The goal is not a number. It is that you understand how buyers think, so you walk into a sale already fluent in it.

Who it is for

Founder-owned, operator-run companies in healthcare, business services, and software.

It is built for two kinds of owner: the one with a transition somewhere on the horizon who wants to walk in prepared, and the one who is not selling at all but wants to understand, and close, the gap between what the business is worth now and what it could be.

You do not have to be selling. The Buyer's View is most useful when a sale is still years away, or not on the table at all, because that is when there is time to act on what it finds.

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About

Luther Gatewood

Fifteen years pricing and restructuring deals from the buy side. Now I do that work for the owner.

Buy-side

Private equity, distressed credit, and special situations

Education

MBA, Stanford GSB · AB, Harvard

Focus

Founder-owned healthcare, business services, and software

The seat I sat in

I spent my career on the buy side: investment banking at Morgan Stanley, private equity at Apax Partners, distressed credit and special situations at Elliott Management, and senior investment work at Athyrium Capital Management. Much of it was on deals where something had already gone wrong, the situations where the gap between what a business looks like and what it is worth is widest.

In that work I sat where a buyer decides: whether to acquire a business and what to pay for it. I built the models and found the risks. More than once I led a team that had to make the hard call not to invest in a business we were genuinely excited about, because the owner had not taken the steps an ownership transition requires. I have also taken a fresh, independent look at a fund's biggest investment and led the restructuring of a business from heavy cash burn to a clean exit.

That is the seat almost no founder has ever sat in, and it is the seat this work is about.

Why I do this

The owners I met on the buy side were almost always more capable operators than I will ever be. What they lacked was not skill or judgment about their own business. It was a view of how the other side of the table would see it, and that gap cost them, quietly, in the one transaction that mattered most.

I started Arbor Portal to close that gap before it gets expensive. I represent no buyer and carry no transaction fee, so my only job is to make you the most prepared person in the room.

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What a buyer sees

Four things a buyer found that the seller's own side had missed.

All are drawn from real diligence, with identifying detail removed. They are here to show the kind of thing The Buyer's View surfaces, in both directions: the risks that kill deals, and the value everyone else gets wrong.

01 · The risk that killed the deal

A specialty manufacturer with one customer holding all the profit.

A specialty manufacturer was being sold through a banker, and the marketed numbers looked healthy. In diligence I found what the bank had missed: a single customer was under half of revenue but more than all of the profit. Losing that one account would have turned the business from profitable to loss-making. The customer had no contract and a history of switching suppliers.

The question that surfaced it was not a clever one. It was the question a buyer always asks and a seller almost never does: what happens to the economics if your biggest customer walks away?

By the time that risk was on the table, the only fix, asking the customer to sign a contract, had to happen under the pressure of a live sale, which signals to your most important relationship that you are selling. The deal died. Done a year earlier, on the owner's own schedule, that same conversation is routine, and the business goes to market with the risk already closed instead of exposed.

02 · The risk one seat down

An adult day services company where no one wanted the next seat.

An adult day services company in New England came to market, and the operation itself was strong. The CEO ran it well, the sites performed, and the financials held up in diligence. What gave buyers pause had nothing to do with the numbers. The CEO was not the owner, so the entire investment rested on whether one hired leader would thrive under new ownership, and beneath her there was no one ready to step up. The strongest site leader was excellent in her seat and wanted to stay in it. The others were not ready for more. In a region where recruiting senior operators is genuinely hard, there was no plan B.

The question a buyer asks is not whether the leader is good. It is who steps up if the leader ever leaves, and how long it takes to find out.

The company had no answer, so buyers either walked or priced the risk into their offers. None of this surfaced in the company's own process until buyers found it. Building a bench, or even one credible successor, takes years, which is exactly why it cannot be fixed inside a sale. Done early, it widens the universe of buyers who can say yes. Found late, it narrows that universe to whoever is willing to bet everything on a single person.

03 · The value everyone else got wrong

An infrastructure maintenance business priced as if it were broken.

An infrastructure maintenance business went to market, and buyer after buyer passed for the same reason: a large deferred liability on the balance sheet for future maintenance the company was committed to perform. The owner's own CFO, conservative by training, had booked it that way.

The liability was overstated. The company only owed that future work while customers kept paying their recurring subscriptions, and the CFO had carried the full future cost with none of the future revenue that came with it. On paper the business looked far weaker than it was.

A conservative or misunderstood set of financials can quietly cost you both the buyers who would have competed for you and the price they would have paid, and you usually cannot see it yourself, because it looks like prudence.

Most of the buyer pool never got past the balance sheet. The owner ended up selling into a thin field of bidders, at a price that reflected a business in trouble rather than the one they actually had. The Buyer's View catches the places where your own numbers are working against you, in both directions, before they quietly shrink your buyer universe and your price.

04 · Growth that didn't survive the math

A therapy provider growing twenty percent a year, with a core that was quietly shrinking.

A therapy provider serving assisted living communities had recently expanded into hospice, and the topline looked excellent, growing better than twenty percent a year. In diligence I broke the growth apart. All of it was the new hospice line. The core business was shrinking.

A shrinking core with a new line on top can be a perfectly sound strategy. Exiting unprofitable accounts, concentrating on better customers, adding a higher-margin service, a buyer can underwrite all of that, if the company tells the story first and the numbers support it. Here, nobody told it. Buyers found it.

The same fact, discovered instead of disclosed, reads the opposite way: a business that could not grow its core, with a new product covering for it. That perception, fair or not, ended buyer interest.

The painful part is how available the fix was. A year or two earlier, the owner could have rebuilt growth in the core, or owned the mix shift openly and positioned it as deliberate. Either works. What does not work is letting the buyer's team be the first to do the math, because whoever breaks your numbers apart first decides what they mean.

What would a review find in your business?

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Contact

Start a conversation.

Tell me a little about your business. A short call is the place to start, with no obligation and nothing to prepare.

Reach me directly

You reach me directly, not an intake team or a form.

luther@arbport.com

I read every note myself and reply personally.