The Exit Readiness Playbook

Your first week, and five takeaways

Part 12 of 13 · All chapters

You have read a lot. If you forget the rest, hold onto these five, because across the businesses I built and sold these moved the price the most.

  1. Prepare two years out, not ninety days out. The owners who get the top of their range start a year and a half to two years before they list, while the ones forced to sell fast take the discount. Time is the cheapest lever you have.
  2. Treat yourself as an employee of your own business. Pay yourself a fair market salary, keep your personal spending off the company books, and reinvest the profit into the balance sheet. A buyer pays for what a new owner earns after hiring someone to do your job, measured on books kept clean of your personal life.
  3. Hire the best accountant and lawyer money can buy, even if you pay them more than you pay yourself. Clean books closed in days and contracts kept current are the line between a business that is ready to sell and a project list.
  4. Kill the silent value killers early. Spread your customer base and get the business running without you. Both take twelve to eighteen months, and both show up directly in your multiple.
  5. Win on structure, not just on price. The headline gets the handshake, but the structure decides the check. A clean deal at a lower number can beat a bigger one paid out over years on someone else's terms, so read the structure first.

What to do this week

You do not have to decide to sell to do any of this, and an hour or two is all it takes. Answer the three readiness questions from Chapter 1 honestly, start the one shared folder of documents from Chapter 3 even if the sale is years off, and pull your top-customer percentage from Chapter 4 and write it down. Then book an hour each with an M&A accountant and an M&A attorney this month, just to ask what readiness looks like for a business your size. The owner who does these four small things this week is already ahead of the owner who waits.

Start today. Pick the one checklist in this book that scares you a little, and begin there. You have more time than the owner who has not read this, and far more than the one who starts cleaning up the year before he sells. Use it.