Advisory · Exit planning
Leave on your own timeline.
12 to 36 months out
The best exits are decided long before a buyer appears. Exit planning is the operating work that makes a company easier to buy and worth more when it sells: financials a buyer can trust, a business that runs without you, contracts that transfer, and a story the numbers support. We do it with you, inside the business, because we run businesses ourselves.
The program
Exit planning from Black Key Advisory is a structured twelve-to-thirty-six-month readiness program for founder-led companies: a readiness assessment against buyer diligence standards, financial normalization and reporting upgrades, owner-dependence reduction and management development, customer and revenue diversification, lease, license and contract cleanup, documentation of systems, and a valuation checkpoint before the company goes to market.
What the timeline looks like
Exit planning runs in phases: assess the company against what a buyer will test, fix the items that move value, build the reporting and management layer, then re-value and decide when to go. The order is deliberate. Financial cleanup comes first because everything else is measured through it.
- 36Months out
Assess
A readiness review against a buyer's diligence list. Financial, legal, operational, customer, people, licensing. Every finding ranked by its effect on value and its cost to fix.
- 30Months out
Normalize
Clean books, consistent accounting method, add-backs documented, monthly close that a quality-of-earnings team will accept.
- 24Months out
Delegate
Move relationships, decisions and knowledge off the owner. Build or hire the second layer. Write the operating manual.
- 18Months out
Diversify
Reduce concentration in customers, channels, suppliers and platforms. Extend the lease. Renew the key contracts on transferable terms.
- 12Months out
Prove
Twelve months of results under the new structure. Growth that is explainable. Reporting that ties out.
- 06Months out
Re-value
A second valuation against the first. The delta is the return on the program. Decide when to go to market.
- 00Market
Go
Hand off to the sell-side process, with the company ready to withstand diligence.
The levers that change the outcome
Seven levers account for most of the difference between the multiple an owner hopes for and the one a buyer pays: financial credibility, owner independence, revenue quality, concentration, transferability of contracts and licenses, documented systems, and a growth story the numbers support.
- Financial credibility
- Reviewed or audited statements, monthly close, add-backs with evidence.
- Owner independence
- The business runs a month without you and nobody notices.
- Revenue quality
- Recurring, contracted, diversified, and growing for reasons you can name.
- Concentration
- No customer, supplier or channel large enough to hold the deal hostage.
- Transferability
- Leases, licenses, key contracts and IP move with the company without renegotiation.
- Systems
- Written processes, a data stack a buyer can plug into, no tribal knowledge.
- The story
- A growth thesis the last three years support and the next three make plausible.
Why an operator should run your readiness
Readiness is operating work, not advisory theater. Our marketing and software divisions build the reporting, attribution and revenue systems that buyers pay for. When a company needs its numbers to tie out, its funnel to be measurable, or its growth to be repeatable, we can build that inside the business rather than recommend it from outside.
That is the difference between a plan and a result. A readiness memo tells you what a buyer will find. We would rather it find nothing.
Exit planning · Questions
Questions owners ask
When should I start planning my exit?
Ideally two to three years before you want to sell. Most value-moving changes, such as reducing owner dependence and proving a growth trend, need at least twelve months of results to be credible to a buyer. Starting later still helps; starting the month you decide to sell mostly does not.
What do buyers look at in due diligence?
Financial statements and tax returns, quality of earnings, customer concentration and contracts, leases, licenses and permits, employee agreements, litigation, intellectual property, systems and data, and how dependent the business is on the owner. Exit planning works through that same list in advance.
Is exit planning worth it if I might not sell?
Yes. Every item on the list makes the company more profitable and easier to run whether or not it sells. Owners who complete the program and then keep the company usually keep a better one.
Start two years early. Or start now.
Notice
Black Key Holdings provides business transaction and M&A advisory services. We do not provide legal, tax, accounting, investment, securities or regulatory advice. Services and transaction structures vary by jurisdiction. Each party should retain its own qualified legal, tax, accounting and regulatory professionals. Nothing on this website constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase any security or licensed business interest.