Earlier than feels reasonable, and for reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to leave. The work that raises the price is the same work that makes the business run without you.
I spent just over ten years as a tax accountant before I bought into a business myself. The best part of that job was never the numbers. It was sitting across the desk from the people who ran small businesses and hearing what they were actually carrying.
In all those years, I could count on one hand the owners who had an exit plan longer than a sentence. The sentence was almost always the same one: “the business is my super.”
Why that sentence should worry you
It happens honestly enough. You draw what you need, reinvest the rest, and because you’re not on a wage, nothing goes into super along the way. The business becomes the retirement plan by default.
Which means your retirement now depends on one asset, sold once, at a moment you may not get to pick. That’s a level of concentration no adviser would let you hold in any other part of your life.
Waiting shrinks the menu
Here’s what I’ve seen happen to owners who left it late, over and over.
The burnout sale. You want it gone, and you want it gone quickly, so you take less than it’s worth. Buyers can smell the hurry.
The forced earn-out. Almost every transaction ties the founder in for a handover, typically one to two years. If you sell exhausted, you’re now working the two hardest years of your life in a business that’s no longer run your way.
The fizzle. The business just winds down with you. All the effort, the relationships, the team you built, and it ends as a set of customers scattering to competitors. That one I think is the biggest waste of all.
None of these are pricing problems. They’re timing problems. Wait too long and you simply don’t get as many choices as you would have had.
The three-year overlap
The reason to start early is not that selling takes long. It’s that the work which raises the price is the same work that makes the business run without you, and that work takes two to three years whichever way you cut it.
Leaders who can carry it without you. Systems written down instead of living in your head. Revenue that recurs instead of feast and famine. Financials a stranger could read and trust. Each of those moves what a buyer will pay, and each pays you back long before any sale. There’s no version of a good exit that skips this, and no version of a good business that doesn’t want it anyway.
So “start thinking about your exit” doesn’t mean “start leaving”. It means start building options, while they’re cheap.
You may never use the door. Build it anyway
Our preference at Exit Forward is that founders don’t exit at all, in the traditional sense. Often what someone actually needs is to exit the way they’ve been working: hand off the parts of the role that are burning them out, take some money off the table through a staged transaction, and keep a stake that pays them from the asset they built instead of eating into a lump sum.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Business owners are builders, not investors. Hand a builder a single cheque and no income, and watch the principal shrink. A staggered transition, with equity retained, replaces the salary with something durable.
Where to start this quarter
Not a novel. Four things.
- List the decisions only you can make. That list is your risk register. Every line on it is something a buyer will discount, and something you can start handing over.
- Get your real numbers. Not the tax return. What the business actually earns once your own role is priced properly.
- Write the one-page plan. Values, a three-year picture, and the handful of things that matter this quarter. One page, laminated if you like. I’ve seen founders keep theirs under the keyboard for years.
- Have the conversations early. The seeds you plant now fruit in three or five years. One of the acquisitions we completed in 2024 started as a conversation eight years earlier.
The best time to think about your exit is when you don’t need one. That’s the only time it’s a strategy, and not a reaction.