How to sell a tech services company

A buyer pays a multiple of the profit they believe will repeat without you — and finance is the language that belief is won or lost in. For most founders of tech services and consulting firms, the gap between a fair valuation and a great one isn't the business itself. It's how that business is measured, recognised, and reported.

Built from a live session with Piotr and Tomek Karwatka — who sold Divante for roughly forty times an early "rescue" offer — this guide walks through the finance decisions that quietly add or strip a turn off your multiple, long before a buyer is in the room.

What's inside

‍Eight chapters, one argument: you're not selling last year's profit, you're selling the credibility of next year's.

• Why two firms with identical profit can sell ~30% apart — and where that discount hides
• How buyers actually build the number: normalised EBITDA × multiple, and the seven levers that move it
• Add-backs that hold up in diligence versus the ones that destroy trust
• Revenue recognition (percentage-of-completion) and IP recognition — the two most overlooked sources of value in a services business
• The top-performer benchmarks buyers measure you against, and how an auction protects your price

Who it's for

‍Founders and CFOs of services, consulting, and tech-enabled firms eyeing an exit in the next one to three years. Skim it as a founder; hand the "For your CFO" sections to your finance lead as a checklist.

Making companies sellable is what we do at Incro. If you want to see where your own numbers stand, the final chapter shows exactly where to look first.

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