Five Signs It’s Time to Start Planning Your Exit — Part 1: The Signs
By Rod Johnston, MBA, CMA
You built this business. You know every truck, every crew, every account that pays late and the ones that never do. And somewhere in the last few years, without ever making a formal decision about it, you started thinking about what comes after.
That thinking isn’t premature. It isn’t giving up. It’s exactly the right instinct, and the owners who listen to it early are the ones who end up with real choices when the time comes to sell. The ones who wait until they’re exhausted, or forced into it by health, by a partner’s decision, or by circumstances they didn’t choose, those are the owners who leave money on the table.
So how do you know if it’s time to start? Here are five signs I see over and over in owners who are further along than they realize.
Your business can’t run without you standing in the middle of it. If you took three weeks off tomorrow, would your team keep every promise you’ve made to your customers, or would things start to slip the moment you stopped answering your phone? A business that depends on the owner personally is a business that’s harder to sell and worth less when it does.
You’ve quieted down. Fewer new contracts. Fewer big swings. You’re maintaining rather than building, and if you’re honest with yourself, you have been for a while. That isn’t laziness. That’s often the first sign some part of you has already started planning your exit, even if you haven’t said the word out loud yet.
You catch yourself doing the math. You see a headline about a business like yours selling, and instead of scrolling past it, you actually read the article and wonder what yours would go for. You aren’t obsessing over it. But you’re thinking about it more than you used to.
Your best people could walk out the door and take a real piece of the business with them. No retention plan. No clear path if your operations manager gets a better offer next month. That kind of risk is invisible to you day to day, and it’s the very first thing a buyer’s advisor is trained to find.
You genuinely don’t know what your business is worth. Not a guess. Not a number you heard from another owner at a conference. An actual, current valuation based on your real financials. Most owners we talk to haven’t had one done in years, if ever.
If two or three of these sound familiar, you aren’t behind. You’re exactly where most owners are the day before they start doing this the right way. And the right way starts years before you ever put your business on the market, not the month after you decide you’re done.
Next week, I’ll walk through what to actually do with each of these five signs, the concrete first steps that turn “I’ve been thinking about it” into a real plan. For now, just notice which ones landed. That noticing is where every good exit actually begins.
High Mark Exit Advisors
If you’d like a practical next step, download our free Exit Readiness Checklist and see where your business stands today.