buyable
A profitable business isn't always a buyable one.
Nick Molina has spent decades on both sides of the table: building and selling his own companies, then evaluating thousands more as a buyer. He's passed on most of them. Not because they weren't good businesses, but because they weren't buyable ones.
Where an owner sees loyal customers, strong relationships, and healthy profits, a buyer sees customer concentration, owner dependency, and financials that need verifying. In that gap, deals collapse and valuations get slashed.
In Buyable, Molina takes you inside real deals, closed and abandoned, to show what buyers look for and how to see your business through their lens. Then he gives you actionable steps to close the gap.
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Hardcover, paperback and audiobook.
About the Author
A founder who became the buyer.
Started 22 businesses. Exited 6. Bought close to 20.Â
Nick Molina started his first company at 21. Let’s Talk Cellular & Wireless grew into the nation’s largest specialty wireless retailer, went public on Nasdaq in 1997, and was later acquired by Sprint/Nextel. He's gone on to found and exit 5 additional businesses to private equity or public companies.
Today he runs Integris Asset Partners, where he buys and grows established businesses. That seat gives him a view most authors in this space don’t have: he reads the CIMs, runs the diligence, and decides which owners get a wire and which get a pass. Buyable is what he wishes every one of them had read first.
Nick is a three-time Inc. 500 honoree and lives in Key Biscayne, Florida.
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Where Deals Die
Your business is worth what a buyer can verify and run without you.
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Buyers don’t pay for what you built. They pay for what transfers. Anything that lives in your head, your relationships, or your reputation gets discounted, restructured into an earnout, or disqualified outright.
It runs because you’re there.
If you’re the one who sells, signs, and decides, the buyer isn’t acquiring a company. They’re acquiring a job. The multiple drops, or the offer never comes.
Your best customer is their biggest risk.
Three accounts making up half your revenue looks like loyalty to you. To a buyer it’s concentration, and it gets priced accordingly.
Profits they can’t prove.
Strong margins mean nothing if the books don’t tie out. Numbers a buyer can’t verify get retraded at the worst possible moment.
The price moves after the handshake.
The LOI isn’t the finish line. Most of the damage happens between the signed letter and the wire, when diligence turns findings into discounts.
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recommended by those who knowÂ
Advance praise for Buyable.
I wrote the book on buying businesses. Nick has written the book on preparing yours to be bought. He has bought and sold businesses many times. If you plan to sell someday, this is where you start.Â
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Walker Deibel
Wall Street Journal & USA Today Bestselling Author of Buy Then Build
Buyable is a valuable playbook for entrepreneurs who are thinking about selling and want to make sure the business they’ve worked so hard to build is ready when they are.
Eddy Arriola
Bestselling Author of It’s All About Relationships and founder and former CEO of Apollo Bank
I partnered with Nick on one of his many successful ventures and worked alongside him all the way to the exit. He is a world-class operator who knows how to build value buyers will pay for. In Buyable, he shows you exactly how. Read it before you need it.
David Herrera
Managing Partner, EFG; Former President, Norwegian Cruise Line
The Core Idea
Buyable isn't a sale strategy. It's an operating standard.
Here’s the part most owners miss: the things that make a business transferable are the same things that make it stronger today. A company that can run without you is more scalable. Revenue a buyer trusts is revenue you can forecast. Contracts and processes that survive diligence are the ones that survive a key employee leaving.
So this isn’t a book you read the year before you sell. It’s a lens you run the business through from here forward. Every decision gets a second question: does this make the company more valuable to someone who isn’t me?
Owners who operate this way get a choice most never have. They sell when they want, to whom they want, on terms that don’t claw back what they built. Or they don’t sell at all, and own a business that works without them. Either outcome is the point.
That's what's on the other side of this book. And it starts with making your business buyable.
What Makes This book Different
Most exit books are written by advisors. This one is written by the buyer.
01
The buyer’s chair, not the broker’s.
Most books in this category come from people paid to run a process. This one comes from the person deciding whether to wire the money.
02
Deals that closed, and deals that didn’t.
The stories inside are acquisitions Nick made, walked away from, or watched collapse. You see exactly where the gap opened and what it cost the owner.
03
A diagnostic, not a pep talk.
Thirty-seven factors that kill, discount, or quietly erode value, sorted into five parts in the order a buyer finds them. Read it once as a book. Rerun it every year as a checklist.
From the Author
Why I wrote this book.Â
I’ve reviewed thousands of businesses as a buyer and passed on most of them. The frustrating part was how many were good companies run by people who had done the hard work and still couldn’t get a deal done. Nobody had told them what a buyer actually sees. In 60 seconds, here’s what Buyable is, who it’s for, and what you’ll walk away with.
Be Ready Before They Call
Read it before the buyer does.
Every buyer who looks at your company will run this same checklist. The only question is whether you run it first. Buyable shows you what they’ll find, what it will cost you, and how to fix it while there’s still time to matter.
Hardcover, paperback, and audiobook.
