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Key Takeaways The gap between a $300,000 exit and a $900,000 exit isn’t how good your business is — it’s whether you’ve built the asset buyers actually pay for.
Stop optimizing for taxes and start optimizing for clean books: the pennies you save in April cost you millions at exit.
Many entrepreneurs see building a company and eventually selling it as the ultimate achievement. My first exit happened by accident, and I didn’t even know I’d had one.
I was 19, mowing lawns because I’d bought a mower, and walking to jobs cost me nothing. The day I landed a real job with health insurance, I planned to just stop. Tell the customers thanks, move on. Then a guy knocked on my door and offered to buy my client list. I had no idea you could sell something like that. I took the money, walked away and spent the next 20 years realizing how many founders never figure out what I stumbled into at 19. A small business is an asset, and assets have value beyond what their owners think.
I’ve now sold four companies myself and mentored somewhere between eight and twelve other founders through their own exits. Acqui-hires, fire sales, the occasional clean win. Most of these don’t make the news. When you read “acquired for an undisclosed sum,” half the time it means somebody just dodged bankruptcy.
This article is not for you if you’re trying to engineer a $50 million exit. Above roughly $8 million, you’ll be working with bankers and brokers who handle most of what I’m about to teach you. This is for the founder who’d be ecstatic with a $900,000 outcome and can’t get a broker to return a call because the commission isn’t worth their time. That’s most small business owners. According to BizBuySell’s 2024 Insight Report, the median small business sale was around $350,000, with the average SDE multiple sitting at just 2.57 times across all industries. This is the range where the most money gets left on the table, because nobody’s in the room telling you what your business is actually worth.
One caveat, and I want to be clear about it. I do not advise starting a company for the exit. Start it because you’re solving a real problem for real people. But the smartest founders I know do both. They solve the problem and structure the business so that when Google comes calling, they’re ready.
If you’re an entrepreneur with aspirations to exit someday, here’s what you need to know before you sit down across from a corp dev team.
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