What owners wish they had known earlier.
Practical writing on exit planning, deal mechanics, and the personal side of a business sale. No jargon, no sales pitch. Just the material that moves the needle before the buyer shows up.
Signing the LOI is the starting gun, not the finish line. The 60 to 120 days that follow are when most deals get repriced: Quality of Earnings finds gaps, the working capital peg gets negotiated, disclosure schedules get papered, and customer concentration surfaces in commercial diligence. A week by week look at what actually happens, why so many deals die there, and what to have ready before you sign.
Read more ›Death, disability, divorce, disagreement, distress. Each has a different mechanism, but they share a common result: the owner leaves on someone else's timeline. The data on forced exits is consistent, and the gap in financial outcomes versus planned exits is often measured in millions. What a contingency plan actually changes, and what it needs to include.
Read more ›Business readiness has a well-developed playbook. Personal readiness is a set of financial and structural decisions that have to be made before the transaction closes, most of them with harder time constraints than anything on the business side. The tax structures that matter most require 18 to 24 months to season before a sale. After the LOI is signed, many of those windows close.
Read more ›A founder with a signed LOI and a number she was excited about discovered three weeks into due diligence that her deal was structured as an asset purchase, not a stock sale. The double-tax cost in her situation came to just under $1.9 million. Her attorney tried to renegotiate. The buyer came up $400,000 and called it even. What should have happened before she ever signed the LOI.
Read more ›A QoE is not your CPA's audit repackaged. It is adversarial by design. The buyer's QoE firm is paid to find every number in your EBITDA that does not repeat after you leave, and whatever they find, they use to reprice. The mechanism is simple: reduce EBITDA, apply the same multiple, the purchase price falls. Why founders who run a sell-side QoE first are in a different position entirely.
Read more ›The purchase price in the LOI is not the number that lands in your account. Between signing and closing, a working capital true-up calculation happens. The peg that defines "normal" working capital is negotiated in the purchase agreement. Buyers negotiate it for a living. Most founders do it once. That information gap shows up in the wire amount, often without much ceremony, because the language was set months earlier.
Read more ›A strategic buyer pays for what your company adds to theirs: eliminated overhead, expanded geography, a customer list that complements their existing base. A financial buyer pays for what your company can become under their capital structure and operational playbook. These are genuinely different math problems with different offers, different hold periods, and different expectations of you post-close. Why running both types in a competitive process is almost always the right structure.
Read more ›A founder who sold her company at 54 told me that the seven months between the close and her next project felt longer than the previous decade. Not because she was bored. Because she did not know who she was without a problem to solve. Research on post-sale founders is consistent: a meaningful share want the business back within 18 months, not because the money was bad, but because the exit from the identity was not something they were ready for.
Read more ›Four free interactive tools. Each returns a scored result with the specific gaps to address and the sequence to address them in. No advisor introduction unless you ask for one.
See the free tools