Marketing Diligence Snapshot

What does the Marketing Diligence Snapshot tell you?

Most owners don't find out what a buyer thinks of their marketing until the buyer's diligence team starts asking questions. By then, every gap costs you on price or terms.

The Marketing Diligence Snapshot gives you that answer early, for $500. It looks at your business from the outside, the way a buyer does before they ever see your books, and checks the one thing that can quietly derail a deal: who actually owns your marketing accounts.

What's included in the Snapshot?

• Owner questionnaire. A short set of questions about where your customers come from, who runs marketing and your timeline to a sale.
• Public presence review. Your search results, Google Business Profile, reviews, website and ads, as a buyer researching you would see them.
• Account-ownership check. Whether your domain, website, ad accounts, Google Business Profile, social profiles and email list are in the company's name, or in yours, an employee's or an agency's.
• 0–100 readiness score. Using the same eight areas and weighting as the full Marketing Due Diligence Assessment.
• Your top 5 red flags. The issues a buyer is most likely to find, ranked by how much they could matter.
• 45-minute readout. We walk through the score and the red flags, and what to do first.

How does the Snapshot work?

1. Quick consultation. We talk through where the business is and your timeline, and I confirm the Snapshot is the right starting point. If you're close to a sale, the full assessment may fit better.
2. Questionnaire. You answer the owner questions.
3. Review. I review your public presence and check account ownership.
4. Readout. Within a week of your questionnaire, a 45-minute call with your readiness score and top 5 red flags.

Snapshot or full assessment: which do you need?

The $500 Snapshot fee is credited toward the full assessment if you go on to it.

Who is the Snapshot for?

• Owners thinking about selling in the next one to five years who want to know where they stand
• Owners doing $1 million to $10 million a year who still carry most of the marketing themselves
• Owners who want a quick, low-cost read before committing to a full assessment

Even if a sale is years away, the same gaps that lower a valuation also make the business harder to grow and harder to step back from.

What red flags does the Snapshot look for?

These are common marketing issues a buyer will flag in an owner-led business, drawn from the same framework as the full assessment:

• Accounts in the wrong name. The domain, ad accounts, Google Business Profile or email list belong to the owner personally, an employee or an agency, not the company.
• No source data. Nobody can say where new customers come from, or most of them trace back to the owner personally.
• One channel carries the business. A single channel brings in more than half of leads, or growth stops when ad spend stops.
• A weak first impression. Few, stale or negative reviews, competitors who dominate search, or a brand that's hard to find.
• Nothing written down. The owner is the brand, the salesperson and the marketer, and none of it is documented.

Why is it worth $500?

The Snapshot is built on the same framework as a $3,500 diligence engagement. It won't trace deals or put dollar figures on each gap, but it will tell you whether your marketing is diligence-ready, fixable before listing, or a real risk to your price, and which five things to look at first.

Who runs it

I'm Justin Smith, founder of Ronin Communications. I run an M&A advisory practice alongside Ronin and spent more than 20 years in strategic communications and marketing for the federal government. I review marketing the way a buyer does: as part of what the business is worth.