The company runs on conversations only you can have. Buyers will price that.

The preparation everyone talks about is financial. Clean the books, normalise the earnings, build the data room, get the contracts signed.

That work matters and it is not what moves the number. What moves the number is whether the business still functions when you are not in the room. A buyer is not purchasing last year's revenue. They are purchasing the next five years, and they are trying to work out how much of it walks out of the door with you at close.

Buyers do not pay for revenue. They pay for a network of conversations that runs without the founder standing in the middle of it.

Every agreement that lives only in your head, every relationship only you hold, every decision that routes through you because it always has. Their lawyers will find all of it. You can find it first, and there is still time to fix what you find.

A composite, braided from several engagements. Details are changed.

Services business, a little under thirty million, two years out from a sale he had not told anyone about. The financials were genuinely good. He was confident.

The exercise we ran was simple and he hated it: list every relationship, decision and agreement that exists only because of you. It took him a week and the list ran to two pages. The largest client had never been introduced to anyone else. His operations lead believed she had been promised equity in a conversation four years earlier, which he remembered completely differently. Nobody had ever written it down.

That equity question alone would have surfaced in diligence, at the worst possible moment, with a buyer watching. Instead it surfaced in his own conference room, eighteen months early, and got resolved in a way both of them could live with.

He spent the next year deliberately handing over relationships, and made himself progressively less necessary on purpose, which he described as the strangest work of his career. The buyer's diligence found a company that ran without him. He is convinced it was worth several turns on the multiple, and he left without the thing most founders carry out of an exit, which is the sense that he had abandoned people.