The 12-month pre-sale plan for a Shopify store

Buyers price what they can see in your last twelve months. That has a useful consequence: if you plan to sell in about a year, everything you improve from now on can show up in the numbers a buyer looks at. Things you fix in the final month will barely show up at all.

This is a quarter-by-quarter plan for the year before a sale. Adjust the timing to your situation, but keep the order: measure first, fix the things that take longest to show, and document as you go.

Before you start: get your baseline

Write down where you stand today:

• Trailing twelve months revenue and SDE (see how to calculate SDE)
• Your estimated multiple and price range
• The factors pulling your multiple down, for example owner hours, ad dependence, product concentration, refund rate or a declining trend
• The improvements worth the most in dollars

Your StoreWorth estimate gives you all four in a few minutes. Keep a copy. You'll compare against it at the end of each quarter.

Then pick two or three levers to focus on. Trying to fix everything at once usually means nothing improves enough to show in the data.

Quarter 1: Foundations (months 1 to 3)

The first quarter is about things that take a long time to show results, and about making sure the next twelve months of data will be clean.

Fix the books. Hire a bookkeeper if you don't have one, separate business and personal spending, reconcile Shopify, payment processors and bank accounts monthly, and start an add-back schedule with evidence. See preparing your financials for due diligence.

Start retention work. Set up post-purchase and replenishment email flows, and consider a subscription option for consumables. Customers acquired now only become repeat customers months from now, so this has to start early. See repeat customers.

Begin organic channels. Search rankings and email list growth build slowly. Start improving product and collection pages and capturing emails now.

Log your hours. Track two weeks of your own time so you know what to document and delegate.

Quarter 2: Reduce dependence (months 4 to 6)

Document and delegate. Write standard operating procedures for your highest-hour tasks and hand them to a virtual assistant, a 3PL or a freelancer. Aim to have them running without you by the end of the quarter. See how to make your store run without you.

Diversify traffic. If one ad platform drives most of your sales, test a second channel and push owned channels harder. See how buyers see a single-channel store.

Address concentration. Plan and launch range extensions around your hero product, and qualify a backup supplier. See managing concentration risk.

Move accounts to the business. Make sure Shopify, the domain, ad accounts, email tools and supplier communications are owned by the business, not by you personally.

Quarter 3: Prove it works (months 7 to 9)

Take a real break. Step away for two weeks. Whatever breaks becomes your next SOP.

Watch the numbers. By now, retention, channel mix and owner hours should start to move. Compare against your baseline. If a lever isn't moving, decide whether to push harder or switch focus.

Tidy up costs. Cancel apps and subscriptions you don't use, renegotiate shipping and supplier terms, and stop running one-off projects through the business. Every recurring dollar of cost you remove is worth several dollars of sale price. Avoid cuts that hurt future revenue, such as stopping ads that bring in profitable customers; a buyer will see the effect.

Reduce refunds. Review your main refund reasons and fix product pages, sizing information or quality issues behind them.

Quarter 4: Get ready to sell (months 10 to 12)

Re-run your valuation. Compare it to your baseline. The change is evidence of what your work was worth, and the remaining negative factors are what buyers will focus on.

Build the data room. Monthly P&Ls, tax returns, Shopify and payment processor reports, channel and ad data, inventory records, supplier terms, the add-back schedule and your SOP library, all in one organised folder.

Write the story. A one-page summary of the business: what it sells, who buys, how it acquires customers, what has improved in the last year and why, and what a new owner could do next. Be accurate. A buyer will check it against the data.

Choose your route. Decide between a marketplace, a broker or a private sale. See where to sell a Shopify store.

Understand offers before they arrive. Know how earnouts, seller notes and inventory change what an offer is worth. See headline price vs. what you take home.

Get advisers lined up. A lawyer who handles business sales and a tax adviser, before you sign anything.

Keep running the business

The most common mistake in the final months is letting the business slide while you focus on the sale. Revenue that starts to fall during diligence can lead to a lower price or a cancelled deal. Keep marketing, keep inventory stocked, and keep the trend line pointing the right way until the money is in escrow.

Illustrative example. A store starts the year at $130,000 SDE and an estimated 2.4x multiple, about $312,000. Over twelve months the owner cuts their hours from 40 to 12 a week, raises returning customer revenue from 15% to 28%, and brings ad spend from 30% to 20% of revenue. SDE rises to $150,000 and the multiple to 3.0x. The estimate becomes $450,000. Each change is modest. Together they compound.

Where to start

Get your baseline today with the free estimate. If you want a structured version of this plan, with lessons, checklists and an AI advisor that knows your store's numbers, Raise Your Multiple is built around exactly this year.