What good PR looks like when you are preparing your business for sale
If you want to sell in the next three years, read this.
If you want to sell in the next three years, then start PR now. If you’ve just started and ever want to exit, also start now. Every touchpoint builds reputation and adds value.
Sale-ready PR has a different job to do than ordinary brand-building, and the businesses that get it right start the work well before they sell. For sale-ready PR, start thinking eighteen to twenty-four months out.
It takes time to build credible coverage, secure award recognition, and shift a business's public profile from founder-dependent to brand-led. Three months gives you a press release- more than that gives you an actual reputation.
Audit what is already out there
Before you build anything new, find out what a buyer's advisor will find when they Google you. Old negative coverage, outdated executive profiles, abandoned social accounts, inconsistent messaging across platforms. Due diligence teams are thorough, and an unexplained mess in your public footprint raises questions you would rather not be answering mid-process.
Build a body of third-party evidence
This is the practical engine room: trade press coverage tied to genuine expertise, award entries that are realistic and well-targeted, case studies that can be independently verified, speaking slots at recognised industry events. None of this needs to be glamorous. It needs to be credible, consistent, and citable. This is what goes into the evidence pack alongside the financials.
Reduce the founder dependency
If every piece of coverage, every quote, every relationship is tied exclusively to the founder, a buyer reasonably worries about what happens when that founder exits post-completion. Part of sale-ready PR is deliberately building visibility for the wider leadership team, so the business's reputation does not leave the building with one person.
Keep the cadence steady, not suspicious
Two patterns look equally engineered to a sharp buyer: a business that suddenly goes quiet in the run-up to a sale, and a business that suddenly gets very loud. Both read as manufactured. The credible pattern is the boring one: steady, consistent activity that looks exactly like what the business has been doing for years, because it has.
Resist the urge to oversell
This is the mistake that costs the most. Founders deep in a deal process sometimes start making bigger claims in the press than usual, sensing an opportunity to talk the business up. Due diligence will test every claim made publicly in the months before a sale. An overstated quote in a trade magazine can become an uncomfortable conversation with a buyer's lawyer. Confidence is good. Inflation is a liability.
Get your comms and your advisors talking to each other
The press cuttings, the awards, the bylined articles, all of it needs to end up in the hands of whoever is building the vendor due diligence pack. Too often, good PR work sits disconnected from the sale process, doing nothing for the deal because nobody thought to package it up. Make sure your comms activity and your deal advisors are working from the same page, not running in parallel.
For the founders and MDs with a sale somewhere on the horizon, this is the difference between PR that looks good on Instagram and PR that actually earns its place.
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