Build Your MSSP Sale Readiness Worksheet: Acquire.com vs Flippa

List every client contract with its annual value, renewal date, and whether it auto-renews or requires active re-signing. Split monitoring and detection retainers from one-time assessment or penetration testing work, since buyers will value the two very differently. A buyer coming through Acquire.com will want this connected to verified billing data where possible; a buyer coming through Flippa's broader pool may accept a well-organized spreadsheet as a starting point instead.

While you're building this column, also note which contracts include an SLA with financial penalties for missed response times. A buyer will want to know your track record against those SLAs specifically, not just whether the contract renewed.

Note every certification your firm holds, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, or similar, along with the date of your last successful audit and who performed it. A lapsed certification, or one that's never actually been through an external audit despite being listed on your website, is exactly the kind of gap a buyer's own security review will catch, and it's far better disclosed by you first.

Include the auditor's name and whether the relationship is ongoing. A buyer's own security team may want to speak with your auditor directly during diligence, and having that contact ready to go signals a real, functioning compliance program rather than a certificate earned once and never revisited.

Document any security incidents involving your own infrastructure or a client's environment under your watch, how each was handled, and what changed afterward. Buyers expect that a firm doing this work for a living has had at least one real incident to manage. What they're actually evaluating is whether you handled it honestly and fixed the underlying gap, not whether one happened at all.

SOC analyst turnover runs high across the industry, and a buyer will ask how much of your detection and response capability depends on one or two senior analysts who could leave the week after close. List your team by tenure and certification level, and be honest about which roles would be hardest to backfill. A firm with a documented on-call rotation and cross-trained analysts reads as a more durable asset than one built around a single expert.

If you're a founder who still carries pager duty personally, treat that as a finding, not a badge of dedication. A buyer will read it as concentration risk no matter how capable you are, and building a real rotation before you list is one of the more effective moves you can make with the time you have.

Confirm which security tools, SIEM, EDR, threat intel feeds, are licensed to your firm directly versus resold or bundled through a vendor partnership that might not transfer cleanly to a new owner. A buyer's technical diligence will test every one of these, and a license that turns out to be non-transferable can force a renegotiation days before close.

A firm with strong, verifiable recurring monitoring contracts tends to do well on Acquire.com, where buyers already expect and trust billing-verified recurring revenue. A firm whose revenue mix leans more toward project-based assessments, or whose compliance story is still developing, may get a more forgiving audience through Flippa's wider marketplace, including its brokered path for a deal large enough to warrant a dedicated outreach process.

It's normal for at least one column to come back thin the first time you fill this out, usually staffing depth or a certification that's due for renewal. Fix what you can before you list rather than disclosing a known gap and hoping a buyer doesn't dig into it; a buyer who finds an unresolved gap you already knew about will assume there are others you haven't mentioned.

Confirm that each column has a real answer:

• Your contract list shows annual value, renewal date, and auto-renewal status, with monitoring retainers split from one-time assessment and penetration testing work.
• Certifications such as SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 show the date of your last successful audit and who performed it.
• Your incident history documents how each event was handled and what changed afterward.
• Your analyst roster lists tenure and certification level, and shows how much detection depends on one or two senior people.
• Security tools, including SIEM, EDR, and threat intel feeds, are licensed to your firm directly and will transfer cleanly to a new owner.