This step exists to separate two things that feel identical from the inside: a business that cannot work, and a business that cannot work like this. Most owners who reach this question assume the first and are looking at the second, and the difference is usually a smaller version of the same business rather than the end of it.

Doing it properly also gives you back a choice. Continue, change, sell or close are four legitimate outcomes, and all four are better taken deliberately in a quiet month than forced in a bad one. An owner who decides is in a different position from an owner who runs out.

Pull three years of figures if you have them, two at minimum. One year cannot tell you whether something is a dip or a direction, and the direction is the whole question.

Decide now that you will write down whatever the numbers say. This exercise is only worth the hours if you are willing to be told something you did not want to hear, in either direction. Plenty of owners find the business is in better shape than their exhaustion suggested.