What is business exit planning: Build a business buyers fight for

Trevor Stevenson-Platt

01 Nov 2025 — 4 min read

You don’t sell a business. You stage an exit.

Most founders treat the sale like a finish line. It’s not. It’s a performance review where every corner you cut shows up under a microscope.

You built something real. The question now is whether it’s sellable, without you glued to the steering wheel.

Why this matters right now

You don’t get to pick your market mood. Multiples move. Buyers go quiet. Burnout creeps in and turns “maybe next year” into “why did I wait?”

I’ve seen great companies limp to mediocre exits because the founder waited until the last six months to get serious. I’ve also seen clean, unsexy businesses spark bidding wars because the owner planned like they’d sell tomorrow, even if they didn’t.

Let’s make sure you’re in the second camp.

What is business exit planning, really?

When people ask what exit planning is, they imagine binders and buzzwords. Forget that.

Exit planning is designing optionality. It’s the system that makes your business transferable without drama, commands a premium, and lets you decide when, not hope someone picks you.

It’s not a project you tack on at the end. It’s a set of choices you make now:

Build cash flow that’s predictable, not heroic.
Make the machine run without you.
Keep clean books and a simple story.
Remove landmines that spook buyers.

If you never sell, you get a stronger, easier company. If you do sell, you don’t bleed in diligence.

Make your business sellable, not just successful

Buyers don’t buy your potential. They buy what will keep working the day after you walk out.

Focus on transferability:

People: No single point of failure. Can a competent stranger run this?
Process: Documented, boring, repeatable. Think “playbook,” not “tribal knowledge.”
Proof: Cohort retention, margins, pipeline health. Show, don’t tell.
Paper: Contracts assignable, IP clean, no handshake deals driving key revenue.
Concentration: No one customer, vendor, or channel can break you.

You’ve likely built these in patches. Exit planning stitches them into a narrative a buyer can trust at speed. This reduces their risk. Reduced risk raises your multiple. That’s the math.

Your exit math: simple, not simplistic
The valuation headline is simple: normalised earnings (EBITDA/SDE) times a market multiple.

But the story behind that number is what moves the multiple up or down.

Here’s the buyer’s lens in plain English:

Reliability: Do the numbers repeat next year without heroics?
Visibility: Can I see revenue coming before it lands?
Control: Are levers (pricing, cost, pipeline) under management, not luck?
Time-to-cash: How fast does money hit the bank?
Bumps: What could go wrong, and how likely is it?

Fixing those levers does more for your price than any slick pitch deck. Think less “convince them,” more “give them no reasons to flinch.”

And keep your financials boring. Boring gets you paid. Clean monthly closes. Sensible add-backs. A tidy working capital picture. A simple, defensible forecast you can hit even on a bad week.

Diligence is gravity: everything you’ve done will show up
You won’t rise to the occasion; you’ll fall to your preparation.

Diligence questions are ruthless but predictable. Use that to your advantage. Build a living data room now:

Three years of financials, monthly.
Customer cohorts and churn.
Signed contracts and renewal terms.
Vendor agreements and liabilities.
Org chart, comp plans, and key role backups.
Process docs for core operations.
Cap table and any equity grants or options.

Keep it current. If a buyer calls, you’re days away from sharing, not months away from cleaning. That speed signals strength and kills renegotiation excuses later.

Timing is a strategy, not a surprise

You’ll be tempted to sell when you’re exhausted. That’s the worst time.

Aim to exit from a position of momentum. Buyers pay for growth they believe will continue, especially without you. If your personal energy is the growth engine, fix that first.

Set a horizon. Eighteen to thirty-six months is ideal. Use it to:

Lock in sticky revenue.
De-risk key roles.
Smooth seasonality.
Trim experiments that won’t mature in time.
Stack small wins that make your trailing twelve months your best twelve months.

Markets cycle. Optionality wins. If you’re ready, you can sell when conditions are right, or wait and keep compounding. Both are power moves.

The human side: exits amplify who you are

Let’s talk about you.

Selling will mess with your identity. Your Slack icon goes dark. Your calendar clears. Your phone stops buzzing. If you haven’t thought about who you are after the wire hits, you’ll cling to the deal or sabotage it in tiny ways.

Two moves help:

Define your “after.” Are you a builder, an investor, a parent with time, a student again? Write it down. Get specific.
Get your wealth plan straight. Taxes, trusts, risk tolerance. Boring? Yes. Essential? Absolutely. A clean plan buys courage at the negotiating table.

Earn-outs and rollover equity aren’t dirty words. They’re tools. Just don’t trade certainty for ego. If you need the business to outperform under someone else’s rules to get paid, be honest about that risk.

What is business exit planning? It’s choosing leverage

Here’s the big idea I want to land like a hammer: you don’t plan to sell, you plan to be sellable.

That shift changes everything. You stop chasing buyers and start building a business that attracts them. You stop praying for a number and start engineering one. You stop waiting for the perfect moment and create a range of good ones.

Key takeaway

Optionality is the ultimate founder power. Build a business that’s easy to buy, and you get to decide if, when, and to whom you sell, at a price that respects what you built and a structure that protects what comes next.