By Lauren Mauldwin and Khaled Azar
You're Busy Building, but What About Exiting?
As an owner, you’re busy building your business, but what about planning your exit? The question of selling your business now might be the furthest thing from your mind. But what if all roads are actually leading to the same destination?
Here's the reality: if you’re not preparing your business to be sold from day one, you're not maximizing its value. You're leaving money on the table—lots of it.
Just as John Warrillow suggests in his book "Built to Sell," exit planning and growth planning are really part of the same journey. Here’s why.
The Myth: Business Growth is for Scaling, & Only After That, I’ll Exit Plan to Sell
We’ve been trained to think about our business in clear-cut phases. First, you build. Then, you grow. Finally, you sell or pass it on. Simple, right?
But thinking this way misses a crucial point: building scalable value and preparing for an exit are not mutually exclusive. By approaching them separately, we put ourselves at a disadvantage.
Think about it: what does business growth focus on? Growth, efficiency, team dynamics, and profitability. What does exit planning focus on? Unsurprisingly, similar metrics, just a layer deeper. Let’s go over the different strategies to see how they overlap.
How Growth and Exit Planning Overlap
Whether you are looking to grow the most successful business possible, or are optimizing it to sell, these questions are the same.
Experienced buyers will ask these questions to determine if a business is worth buying – however, you’ll notice these are the same questions asked when you are building your company for growth.
Growth
How diversified is your customer base?
How have you simplified your offerings for customers?
Have you implemented a long-term retention plan for customers? If so, what does it entail?
Efficiency
Does your business have systematize marketing and sales with a positive ROI?
Does your business have documented systems and SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures)? If not, what steps are you taking to create them?
Team Dynamics
Is your business reliant on you as the brand or product? If so, what steps are you taking to change this?
How have you structured your business to ensure efficiency and scalability? Are there departments? Or do employees wear many hats?
Have you cross-trained your team members?
Have you added experienced growth managers to your team? If so, how have they contributed to your business growth?
Profitability
Do you have clean audited financials for your business? If not, what steps are you taking to achieve this?
How have you differentiated and defended your intellectual property?
Even though an exit vs. growth mindset might have nuances in how you answer and execute these questions, generally they are going to fold together.
Let’s answer a few of these questions to see how the exit vs. growth mindset overlaps.
Q: How diversified is your customer base?
A: From a growth standpoint, you want your customers diversified because it reduces risk—and any buyer is going to want the same thing. This is an easy alignment.
Q: Is your business reliant on you as the brand or product?
A: In this case, you want to be able to step away from the role of being the ‘Chief Everything Officer’ and instead work on specific projects. This allows you to focus on growing the company and removes you as a dependency of its success. Again, by adopting the exit mindset and looking at this from a buyer's eyes, we can see that a new buyer wants to feel comfortable taking over (or putting an operator in place) without risking the success of the business.
Q: Does your business have documented systems and SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures)?
A: It always surprises us how many large companies don’t even have SOPs. This is crucial for growth because it creates an efficient transfer and scaling of repeatable processes. A buyer would see this as a strength when purchasing the business—another example of alignment in needs between the exit and growth approach.
The truth is: EVERYONE has an exit—whether you actually end up selling or not.
Even if you decide to keep the business after going through this process (instead of selling), you now have a passive, incredibly profitable business that wouldn’t have reached this stage without exit planning.
Regardless of what you end up doing, this life cycle of growth will apply. All businesses follow the same trajectory of infancy to maturity.
Whether you want to scale, step away passively, or eventually sell, you need to be ready. You've already done the work. And in business, timing is never guaranteed. Markets crash. External wrenches get thrown in. When life throws a curve ball, you'll be ready to capitalize on your asset, rather than scrambling to make it sellable.
Paradigm Shift: Growth = Exit Preparedness
If you take only one thing from this article, let it be this: every day you spend building your business is a day spent preparing for an exit. The metrics are the same. The strategies are similar. And the benefits, like increased profitability and more efficient operations, are instant. The question is: Do you want to do it effectively?
It’s not about whether you're ready to sell right now; it's whether you want to maximize the value of what you've been building. And if that's not worth your time, what is?
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