Want to accelerate your business? Try looking at it through an investor's eyes.

If someone was considering buying your business tomorrow, what would they want to know?

They'd certainly look at the financial results. But they'd also want to understand what's behind them. How the business makes money, how dependable that income is, what could go wrong and where there's an opportunity to improve performance.

They'd probably ask questions that don't feature regularly in your management meetings.

Management teams spend much of their time delivering results, solving problems and keeping the business moving.

Someone considering buying the business approaches it without the same history or assumptions. They want to understand not only how it performs today, but what makes that performance sustainable and what could improve it.

It's a useful perspective to borrow, even if you have no intention of selling.

Here are ten questions I'd start with.

1. Where do you actually make your money?

Not which products generate the most revenue or which customers are the biggest.

Which parts of your business generate the most profit once you've accounted for all the costs involved in acquiring, serving and retaining customers?

Can you see profitability by product, customer segment, distribution channel and partner?

And how confident are you in the cost allocations behind those numbers?

A high-volume product or distribution relationship can look successful while contributing relatively little to the bottom line.

Rank your five largest products or customer segments by revenue, then by fully loaded contribution. How different are the lists?

2. How much of next year's income do you actually control?

Recurring income is attractive. But recurring doesn't necessarily mean secure.

How much depends on a small number of customers, distribution partners, suppliers or contracts?

Who owns the customer relationship? Who controls the renewal? What happens when a key agreement expires?

In insurance, an intermediary can build a substantial book of business while relying on underwriting capacity, distribution arrangements or renewal rights that it doesn't fully control.

Take your three largest sources of income. What could cause each to disappear, and how much notice would you get?

3. Are you growing, or is the market doing the work for you?

Revenue growth is encouraging, but it's worth understanding what's driving it.

How much comes from genuinely winning more customers or increasing the amount of business you write? How much comes from higher prices, inflation, acquisitions or changes in mix?

In insurance, premium growth can look impressive during a hard market without any corresponding improvement in customer numbers or competitive position.

And when the market turns, the picture can change quickly.

Break your growth over the last three years into volume, price, mix and acquisitions. What does the underlying trend look like?

4. What would a competitor have to do to take your customers?

Most businesses can explain why they're different.

Fewer can demonstrate that customers recognise the difference, value it and are prepared to choose them because of it.

If a competitor matched your price tomorrow, what would keep customers with you?

Is your advantage based on something genuinely difficult to replicate, or simply something competitors haven't chosen to do yet?

And are you investing in the capabilities that sustain that advantage?

Write down the three reasons customers choose you. Then find independent evidence that supports each one.

5. What would break if your business grew by 50%?

Growth plans tend to concentrate on sales, revenue and profit.

But what about the organisation required to deliver them?

Would your technology cope? Could operations absorb the additional workload? Would you have sufficient underwriting capacity, funding and people? Would decision-making become slower as more approvals were introduced?

Sometimes the constraint on growth isn't demand. It's the business's ability to handle more of it profitably.

Ask your leadership team which part of the business would struggle first if volumes increased by 50%. See whether they agree.

6. How much of your three-year plan is already within your control?

Most three-year plans look convincing in a spreadsheet.

But look closely at the assumptions.

How much growth depends on winning new partners, securing additional capacity, launching products, recruiting people or delivering technology that doesn't exist yet?

What has to happen first? Who is responsible? And does the timing of those activities match the financial forecast?

A plan can be mathematically correct and still be commercially unrealistic.

Identify the five assumptions with the greatest influence on your three-year profit forecast. For each, ask what evidence supports it and what happens if it doesn't materialise.

7. Does your business depend too heavily on a handful of people?

Every business has individuals who make an outsized contribution.

But there's a difference between having talented people and being dependent on them.

What would happen if your founder, commercial director, lead underwriter or key relationship manager left tomorrow?

Who holds the important customer and partner relationships? Where does critical knowledge sit? Who makes the decisions that keep the business moving?

A business can have an impressive leadership team but still lack the management depth and processes needed to operate effectively without particular individuals.

And that creates a risk for both an investor and the existing owners.

Identify the three people whose departure would cause the greatest disruption. What would stop working, who could step in and how long would recovery take?

8. What are you continuing to do simply because you've always done it?

An investor coming into a business doesn't have the same attachment to its history.

They'll ask why particular products exist, why resources are allocated as they are and whether established activities still justify the time, money and management attention they receive.

An underperforming product, a legacy process or a longstanding partnership can continue consuming resources long after its original purpose has disappeared.

Those resources could be invested elsewhere.

If you were building your business from scratch today, which three things would you choose not to recreate? And what could you do with the resources they currently consume?

9. Where could a relatively small improvement make a disproportionately large difference?

A small change in an important commercial driver can have a substantial effect when applied across a large portfolio.

Consider conversion, acquisition cost, retention, claims frequency or average income per policy.

Which of these has the greatest influence on your profitability? How sensitive are your results to changes in each one?

And how much control do you actually have over them?

Calculate the annual profit impact of a one-percentage-point improvement in conversion or retention, or a 1% reduction in acquisition costs or claims expenses, where relevant.

Which change produces the largest financial benefit? And which could you realistically deliver?

10. What would make someone pay more for your business in three years?

Would it be higher profits? More predictable income? Less reliance on a handful of partners? Better technology? Stronger leadership? A more defensible competitive position?

The answer should influence what you're doing today.

If you know which characteristics would make your business more attractive to a buyer, you also have a useful basis for deciding where to invest, which risks to reduce and which opportunities to pursue.

And you don't need to sell the business to benefit from any of those improvements.

A useful exercise

You don't need an acquisition process or a team of advisers to start thinking this way.

Take the ten questions above into your next leadership meeting.

For each one, ask three things:

• Do we know the answer?
• What evidence do we have?
• Would we be comfortable with an independent investor seeing that evidence?

You may find that the greatest opportunity isn't a new strategy, product or market.

It could be understanding your existing business a little better.