Handover period

The handover period is the defined stretch of time after completion in which the seller helps the buyer take over running the business, agreed in the purchase agreement rather than left to goodwill.

What handover looks like at $50k–$150k

Thirty days is the usual shape, priced into the deal rather than invoiced on top. It is scoped three ways: how long it runs, how many hours of the seller's time it includes, and how the buyer reaches the seller. A typical arrangement is 30 days, capped at 20 hours, over email with two scheduled calls a week. Anything beyond that is a separate conversation on separate terms.

Where it bites

Unscoped handover goes wrong in both directions. Some sellers are still fielding questions six months later because nobody wrote down when it ended. Others answer three emails, go quiet, and leave the buyer guessing which cron job sends the dunning emails. Generosity fixes neither case, whereas a written scope and documentation delivered before completion rather than during it fixes both.

A worked example

A $120,000 micro-SaaS with $3,300 MRR hands over across four weeks. Week one moves infrastructure and billing while the seller is on hand for anything that breaks. Week two the buyer answers support with the seller reviewing replies. Weeks three and four the buyer runs it alone with the seller on call, and the operating documentation, a written run-through of deployment, billing, support and the monthly admin, was delivered as part of the completion schedule.

Why it matters when you acquire

A business that needs a long handover is telling you something about how much of it lives in the founder's head. A clean 30-day handover, backed by documentation written before anyone signed, is a sign the operation was organised well before the exit was on the table.

Related: operating-documentation, stack-transfer, owner-dependency