Most advisors sell the business you have. Rinnaird engages 12–18 months early, fixes what buyers discount, then runs the sale — so you sell a better business, not just your business.
A traditional business broker markets your business as it is. We change what it's worth first. Buyers pay for durable earnings and de-risked operations — when they find doubt, they don't negotiate, they discount. The four discounts that cost manufacturing owners the most:
If the business needs you to run, the buyer is buying a job, not a company — and prices it that way.
Unclear books force buyers to assume the worst. Diligence surprises become price reductions.
Underpriced work and loose supplier terms read as permanent weakness, even when they're fixable.
One customer over a third of revenue puts part of your price behind an earnout — or kills the deal.
It starts with a free, confidential 30-minute conversation: what your business would be worth to a buyer today, and what it could be worth with runway. If it makes sense to go further, the engagement runs in three phases. Because businesses this size trade on a multiple of earnings, every dollar of improvement is multiplied at close.
A valuation done the way buyers do it, a diligence-style review of your financials and operations, and a gap list ranked by impact on price. Yours to keep, whatever you decide next.
Work the gap list: pricing, supplier terms, lead times, clean recast financials, and a business that runs without you. Hands-on or advisory — matched to your team and scaled to your business.
A managed process: positioning, confidential buyer outreach, negotiation, and diligence through closing. The work from Phase 2 now defends your price — no retrades on numbers we cleaned up ourselves.
No consulting frameworks. The same work I've done inside manufacturing businesses for twenty years:
Most shops underprice their best work. Disciplined pricing recovered ~$1.3M annually at my last business.
Contract renegotiation and sourcing discipline — worth 15% of gross margin in one prior role.
Quick-response methods cut lead times 30% where I last applied them. Faster turns win better work.
Second-tier leadership, documented processes, and clean reporting — so the buyer buys a company, not your workweek. A business that runs without you is worth more at close, and easier to live with every day until then.
If you need to sell this year, Rinnaird runs a straight sell-side process — the strongest process your current numbers allow. If you have runway, the program above gets you a better price. We'll tell you which honestly.
"I haven't sold fifty businesses. I've spent twenty years building the numbers buyers pay for — and I've been the buyer."
Rinnaird is an advisory firm serving owners of small and mid-size manufacturing and industrial businesses. Its sole focus is helping owners understand what their business is worth, prepare it for sale, and see the transaction through to close.
The firm takes its name from An Rinn Aird — "the point of the height" — the coastal townland in County Kerry where Aidan grew up, on the Iveragh Peninsula opposite Valentia Island.
Aidan O'Sullivan has spent 20 years in manufacturing, starting as a project engineer in Ireland and progressing to President, Americas of Quickparts, a private equity-backed on-demand manufacturer, where he held full P&L responsibility for a $40M+ region with 170 employees across three sites. His career spans PE-backed, venture-backed, NYSE-listed, and global plc environments, including plant leadership at Kerry Group.
His M&A experience comes from the buyer's side of the table: on behalf of Shapeways he completed the acquisitions of Linear AMS, a Michigan additive and injection-molding manufacturer, and MFG.com, a manufacturing software marketplace, and led the 18-month post-merger integration. He sourced the acquisition that preceded the company's 2021 NYSE listing and served as its senior-most operations executive through that listing.
Aidan holds an MBA in Finance, Global Business & Strategy from NYU Stern, and a BEng in Mechanical Engineering and BA in Mathematics from Trinity College Dublin. He is based in Virginia.
That's exactly the right time to talk. Thirty minutes, free and confidential: what your business is worth to a buyer today — and what it could be worth with runway.
Book the Free ConversationOne conversation: what your business would be worth to a buyer today, and what it could be worth with 12–18 months of runway. No obligation, no pitch deck, and nothing shared with anyone.
Connect with Aidan on LinkedIn