Your website and brand through a buyer's eyes

The short answer. Long before a buyer reads the accounts, they open the website. What they see there, and in the logo, the packaging and the printed materials, is their first impression of how the business is run. A good company behind a broken website or a brand that stopped in another decade starts the conversation on the back foot. The website is usually cheap to put right. The brand takes more thought, and timing matters: it should feel current at the moment of the sale, not five years after it.

What a buyer sees in the first ten minutes

Buyers, their analysts and their lenders all do the same thing before the first call: they look the business up. In companies that were built in the late 1990s or early 2000s and never properly renewed online, I see the same things again and again.

• No secure connection, so the browser warns visitors that the site is not safe.
• Whole sections that no longer open, maps that do not load, contact forms that send nothing, visitor counters that stopped years ago.
• Layouts that fall apart on many pages, especially where someone once tried something clever. Sometimes half the site simply does not work.
• Broken links everywhere, and search engines that have quietly stopped showing the pages.
• Security holes any scanner finds in minutes, and an admin login like admin with 12345.

These are not the smallest businesses. Some of them could be valued at several million dollars. They sell well offline, their products are good and their customers are loyal. Online, they are close to unreachable.

A good business behind a broken window

An owner who has grown a company through relationships often does not notice the website at all. It never brought the customers, so it never seemed to matter. A buyer reads it differently, for three reasons.

The first is trust. A site with security warnings and dead pages suggests a business that does not maintain what it owns. A buyer starts to wonder what else has been left alone: the equipment, the contracts, the records.

The second is risk. An insecure website with a weak admin password is a security finding, and in diligence a finding becomes a question, a condition or a cost. If customer data passes through the site, the question gets more serious.

The third is the future. Most buyers plan to grow what they buy, and they know that new customers look a business up before they call. A site that cannot be found or used is growth the buyer will have to pay for after closing, and they will want to pay for it out of the price.

The same thinking runs through the other digital assets. Our guide to digital assets a buyer will ask about covers the domain, the accounts and the customer data behind the website.

Putting the website right

The good news is that most of this is small work. In my experience the fixes that matter most to a buyer often cost very little next to what the business is worth. The order matters more than the budget.

1. Security first. A secure connection, current software, strong passwords, old admin accounts removed, a backup that has actually been restored once.
2. What is broken. Dead sections, broken links, maps, forms. Every form should reach a real inbox, and someone should check that it does.
3. Phones. Most visitors arrive on a phone. A site that breaks there is broken for most people.
4. Being found. Basic search visibility, a current Google Business Profile, correct contact details everywhere they appear.
5. Then the look. Only once the site works does it make sense to talk about how it looks.

The first three steps are usually days of work, not months. They also remove the easiest objections a buyer can raise.

When the brand itself has aged

A website is one layer. The other is the brand: the logo, the colours, the typefaces, the printed materials and, for anyone who makes physical products, the packaging. These age too, and they age in two ways.

The obvious one is the look. A logo drawn twenty years ago with the tools and fashions of the time can look clumsy today, and a buyer notices it before they notice anything else. The less obvious one is cost. Packaging that was designed without thinking about production, with too many colours, odd sizes or finishes nobody needed, is more expensive to print every single time. That is not taste. It is cost of goods, and it sits in the margin a buyer is paying for.

Redesigning such a brand well is hard. It is not a matter of an identity audit followed by a new logo. It needs a real evidence base: what the brand stands for, what customers recognise, what competitors look like, what can be produced cheaply and well. It needs testing, on paper, on the shelf, on a screen. And it needs designers who think analytically about where design is going, not only about what wins awards this year. Visual language is changing fast now that AI tools can produce images and video in minutes, and a brand refreshed for a sale should still look right on the day the buyer signs and for the years they will own it.

The designers who do this work with us still begin with pencil and paper, prototypes included, with every digital tool at hand. Like shooting on film, a sheet of paper makes you decide before you commit a line. The screen comes after.

Refresh or rebrand before a sale

An honest caution belongs here. Changing a brand shortly before a sale is not automatically a good idea.

• A refresh keeps what people recognise, the name, the core of the mark, the main colour, and brings the rest up to date. It carries little risk and is usually what a business preparing for a sale needs.
• A full rebrand replaces the identity. It can be right when the old brand works against the business, but it takes time to settle, and a buyer may have plans of their own for the brand.
• Timing. Changes that affect cost or sales, cheaper packaging or a site that brings enquiries, need a year or more to show up in the numbers. Started a year or two before a sale, they become evidence. Started a month before, they are a promise.

A first-look checklist

Look at your own business the way a buyer will, in this order.

1. Does the site open with a secure connection and no browser warning?
2. Do all sections open, and do the maps and forms work?
3. Does it work properly on a phone?
4. Does a search for the company name find the site and a current Google profile?
5. Are the contact details the same everywhere?
6. Is the copyright year, the news section or the latest post from this year?
7. Is the admin login protected by a strong password, with no old accounts?
8. Would you hand the logo and the brand files to a new designer with confidence?
9. Do the printed materials and packaging look like the same company as the website?
10. Do you know what the packaging costs to print, and why?

Who does the work

We assess, and we say plainly what needs fixing. When an owner wants the work done, PERETZ, the design and engineering studio The Structure grew out of, can do it: websites, brand identity, packaging and print. We share an owner, and we disclose that. Working with PERETZ is never a condition of working with us, a fix is never priced or sold inside a review, and PERETZ work is never checked by the people who did it. Many owners use their own designers and developers, and that is fine.

Where this fits in preparing a sale

How the business presents is one of six areas we review in sale preparation, next to the owner's role and the digital assets. The wider context, how many owners are reaching a sale and how few are ready, is in our note on what the data says about the Silver Tsunami.

We do not value businesses or give legal, tax or financial advice. Questions about brand ownership, trademarks and the rights to designs and photographs belong with your attorney.

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