Positioning for Acquirers
Placing your company in the buyer's existing mental bucket as a category leader so it commands a premium multiple.
What Positioning Means in a Sale
Positioning is the deliberate framing of what your company is so that an acquirer files it under the category they are already shopping for. Warrillow titles the idea "Fish Where They Are Biting": rather than inventing a fresh story, you slot your business into a bucket buyers already understand and value. The framing is borrowed directly from marketing strategists Al Ries and Jack Trout.
"The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what's already up there in the mind."
Warrillow, The Art of Selling Your Business, ch. 5 (quoting Ries & Trout)
The shift is from describing your company on its own terms to describing it on the buyer's terms. Acquirers sort companies into mental categories. The same business can sit in a low-value bucket or a high-value one depending on how it is presented.
Why the Bucket Sets the Multiple
The category you land in largely determines the multiple you are measured against. Warrillow's central case is Embanet, an online-education company that was being valued as a low-margin services business at roughly 3x EBITDA. By repositioning it as an education-technology platform, the company was eventually acquired at around 13x EBITDA. The underlying business did not change overnight. The bucket did.
This is why Warrillow treats positioning as an act of leverage rather than cosmetics. A buyer who sees a commodity vendor pays commodity prices. A buyer who sees a category leader inside a hot bucket pays for scarcity and strategic fit. Choosing the bucket buyers are already competing in, and then claiming the leader's spot inside it, is what moves the number.
Selling the Company, Not the Product
A recurring trap is that owners keep selling what they sell to customers instead of selling the company itself. Warrillow draws the distinction sharply through entrepreneur Stephen Watkins.
"Your job as an entrepreneur is to hire salespeople to sell your products and services so you can spend your time selling and marketing your company... You have the right skills, but you're selling the wrong product."
Warrillow, The Art of Selling Your Business, ch. 5 (Stephen Watkins)
The owner is the one person who can position the company at the category level, and during a sale that becomes the real product. Operational pitches about features and day-to-day excellence belong to the sales team. The exit pitch is about which category the company leads and why that category matters to this buyer.
Doing the Positioning Work
Positioning happens before and during the courtship, not at the negotiating table. The practical steps Warrillow implies are: identify which categories buyers are actively shopping, pick the one where your company can credibly claim leadership, and shape every artifact in the sale process around that frame. Positioning reinforces the rest of the leverage-building toolkit. It feeds directly into the teaser and the CIM, and it pairs with the slow reveal so that what you disclose, and when, keeps the buyer anchored on the high-value bucket rather than the low one.
Further Reading
Sources: Warrillow, The Art of Selling Your Business ch.5