Guide
Business Exit Planning
Exit planning is not paperwork you do at the end. It is the work in the two years before a sale that decides which end of the valuation range you land on. Owners who start early routinely sell for meaningfully more than owners who decide in a hurry, and the difference is rarely luck.
The single highest-return move: make yourself replaceable
Owner dependence discounts a business more than any other factor. If the key relationships, the pricing decisions, the technical knowledge and the sales all run through you, a buyer is not purchasing a business. They are purchasing a job with debt attached.
Concretely: hire or promote someone to run daily operations, document the processes only you know, move customer relationships onto the company rather than onto you, and then take a two-week holiday without calls. Whether the business notices is your real readiness test.
Clean the financials at least two years out
Buyers and lenders underwrite the last three years. Personal expenses run through the business are legitimate add-backs, but every one of them has to be identified, explained and evidenced, and each one a buyer disputes comes straight off the price at your multiple.
Two years of clean, separated, consistently categorised books are worth more than any pitch. If you are on cash accounting and your industry norms are accrual, fix that now rather than during diligence.
Fix concentration before it is priced
Any customer above 20% of revenue is a risk a buyer will discount. Any supplier you depend on without a written agreement is the same. Both take time to fix, which is exactly why they are exit planning problems rather than sale-process problems.
The same applies to leases. A short lease with no assignment clause can cap what a buyer can pay, and renegotiating it while you still look like a long-term tenant is much easier than doing it once a sale is public.
Know your number before you need it
Get a valuation well before you intend to sell. Not because the number will still be accurate, but because it tells you the gap between what your business is worth today and what you need it to be worth, and how much time you need to close that gap.
Owners who discover the gap during a live negotiation have no options left. Owners who discover it two years out have every option.
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