For the founder preparing to sell
The company runs on conversations only you can have. Buyers will price that.
And you cannot say any of this to your team, because the moment you do, you have said it.
Free to start · No credit card
What preparation usually means
Financial, because that part has a checklist.
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 a buyer is actually pricing
How much of it walks out with you at close.
Relationships only you hold
The largest client who has never been introduced to anyone else. That is not a relationship the buyer is acquiring, and they know it.
Agreements that live in your head
Every understanding everyone assumes and nobody wrote down. Their lawyers will find all of them, at the worst possible moment.
Decisions that route through you
If your leadership team looks at you before answering a hard question, the buyer has learned everything they need to about the discount.
Buyers do not pay for revenue. They pay for a network of conversations that runs without the founder standing in the middle of it.
They are not purchasing last year. They are purchasing the next five, and pricing the risk that it leaves when you do.
What waiting until diligence costs
The same facts, discovered by the wrong person.
Everything on that list surfaces either way. The only variable is whether it surfaces in your own conference room eighteen months out, or in a data room with a buyer watching and a price already on the table.
One of those is preparation. The other is a renegotiation you will lose.
And the secrecy compounds it. You cannot ask anyone inside the company for help finding the list, which is exactly why founders find it during diligence rather than before.
The list of what only you hold is findable in a week.
100 messages free. No card.
Who this is for
And, more usefully, who it is not.
For someone one to three years out
Far enough that transfers can be deliberate rather than panicked. Inside a live process this is a different and harder conversation.
For someone who will name what they have avoided
There is usually a conversation you have not had with a specific person, and it is the one diligence will surface.
Not for someone who wants deal advice
No valuation, no multiples, no structure, no tax, no view on a buyer. That is a banker and a lawyer and this is neither.
Not for someone who only wants the books clean
Your accountant is already doing the part with a checklist. This is the part without one.
What becomes available
A company that does not flinch, and a founder still whole at the end.
The handful of relationships only you hold get deliberately transferred, over months rather than in a panic. The agreements everyone assumes get written and confirmed. Your leadership team can answer a buyer's hard question without looking at you first, which is the single thing buyers watch most closely.
And you go through the most stressful year of your professional life with somewhere to actually think out loud, which is otherwise the one thing a selling founder cannot get.
How the work goes
Four moves, in order. Not a script, a way of seeing.
Mood
Running a process that will change everyone lives while behaving normally in every meeting. That has a mood and it has been unnamed for months.
Narrative
What you have concluded your team would do if they knew, which is an assessment you have never tested.
Agency
The transfer you can begin this quarter without telling anyone why.
Action
Agreements written, conditions confirmed, and the one conversation you have been avoiding for years.
One founder, disguised
The list ran to two pages, and he hated the exercise.
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 and he was confident.
The exercise was simple: list every relationship, decision and agreement that exists only because of you. It took him a week.
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 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 out, where it cost a difficult afternoon rather than a discount.
A difficult afternoon now, or a discount later. Those are the options.
Roughly three real conversations, free, before anything is asked of you.
Fair questions
The ones you are actually holding.
What is my business worth?
Not a question for this. No valuation, no multiples, no comparables. Ask and you will be pointed at someone qualified instead.
What should I disclose in diligence?
A legal question with real consequences, and this is not legal advice. What this does is help you find what exists before anyone asks.
Can I talk about this safely?
Yours. A small council of senior practitioners reviews de-identified conversations to improve the coaching, and you can switch that off in Settings. Delete anything, any time.
Should I tell my leadership team?
That is a real decision with no clean answer, and it is yours. What this does is examine what you have assumed about how they would react.
I am already in a process.
Then this is later than ideal and still useful, because the conversations that surface in diligence are still conversations.
Is this therapy?
No, and it does not diagnose. It works on moods and language in a working context.
The terms
One hundred messages, then a decision.
A hundred messages free. No card, no trial clock. Roughly three real conversations, which is enough to know.
After that it is one hundred dollars a month, or a thousand for the year.
Cancel in two clicks, and your conversations stay yours.
You cannot say any of this to anyone inside the company. That is the whole problem.
100 messages free. No card.
A company that commands its price and survives the process, and an exit they leave whole.
Start the list aloneWould rather we came to you? Ask us to get in touch, with a line about your situation. A person reads every note, and writes back.