One of the goals of this community is to make the information around selling a business far more transparent than it normally is. Inside the Lab we already have things like: • Due diligence questionnaires • Typical buyer data room request lists • Modules explaining how deal processes work But I’d like to build out the resource library much further. So I’m curious: If you were thinking about selling your business in the next 2–5 years, what information would you actually want access to? For example, things like: • What buyers typically value most in a business • How businesses are actually valued in different sectors • Examples of deal structures (cash, earn-outs, equity rollovers etc.) • What makes a business more or less “sellable” • What buyers tend to worry about during due diligence But that’s just a starting point. What would actually be useful to you as a founder preparing for an exit? Is there anything you’ve always wondered about the deal process but never had a chance to ask? If it’s helpful, we’ll build it into the Lab.

Welcome to The Exit Strategy Lab I started this group after spending about 25 years in the M&A world and noticing one rather consistent problem. Most businesses are not ready to sell. In fact, if I’m being blunt about it, something like 99% of them aren’t. The reason I’m usually brought in is because something has happened. A founder wants to retire. The business needs capital. A shareholder wants liquidity. Perfectly sensible reasons. The only difficulty is that these moments rarely arrive at the exact point the business is actually ready for an exit. For most founders there is only one major capital event in the life of their business. It might be bringing in private equity and taking some money off the table or it might be selling the whole thing. Either way, if you are only going to do this once, it makes sense to do it well. Unfortunately most people start thinking about this far too late. The best businesses are built so that they are ready to sell at almost any point. Even if the founder has no intention of selling for another five or ten years. That doesn’t just protect value at exit. It also makes the company run better in the meantime. Good financial reporting, clear governance, proper systems. All of these things make a business easier to operate and usually more profitable long before a buyer ever appears. The aim of The Exit Strategy Lab is to help founders build their companies into something that buyers genuinely want. This isn’t a one-week course or some overnight transformation. It’s a long-term approach to building a business that is valuable, investable, and ultimately sellable when the time is right. To get started, I’ve put together something called the Business Sellability Score, a simple way of assessing how ready your company might be for a future exit. You can download the scorecard in the first module and see where your business stacks up and if you feel like sharing your score with the group, even better. Finally, a quick note. I realise it’s very easy for someone in my position to sit on the sidelines and dispense advice while you are busy running an actual business but I’ve also built and sold businesses myself and I know perfectly well that the reality is usually messy, time consuming and occasionally chaotic. So the goal here isn’t theory, it is to share practical things that make your business stronger today, while also putting you in the best possible position when the time eventually comes to sell.