Start exit planning 12 to 24 months before you intend to run a sale process. That is our recommendation after 25 years of doing this, and it is earlier than almost every founder thinks, because nearly every founder we meet starts too late.

The sale process itself moves fast. Most of our engagements close within four to six months from kickoff. But the price you get in that process was largely determined in the year or two before it started. Exit planning is the work of determining it deliberately.

Why the runway matters

Buyers pay for what they can verify. A claim you cannot document is a discount waiting to happen. With 12 to 24 months of runway, you can build the record that supports your number: clean financial statements, a trailing period of performance that proves your growth story, contracts that are actually signed and assignable, and metrics (retention, concentration, margin) trending the right direction across multiple reporting periods.

With three months of runway, you get none of that. You get your business as it sits, and you inherit every discount that comes with loose books, a customer representing 40% of revenue, or a company that cannot run for a week without you.

What exit planning actually involves

It is not a binder on a shelf. It is a short list of high-leverage fixes, sequenced by impact. In our exit readiness consulting work, the same items surface again and again.

1. Financial hygiene: accrual-basis statements, clean revenue recognition, a defensible EBITDA bridge.
2. Revenue quality: shift one-time revenue toward recurring, reduce customer concentration, lock in contract terms and assignability.
3. Founder dependence: a management layer and documented processes, so the buyer is acquiring a business rather than a job.
4. Housekeeping: cap table, IP assignments, key employee agreements, compliance items buyers always check.

Each of these takes months, not weeks, to fix credibly. That is the entire argument for starting early. A concentration problem cannot be solved during diligence. A second reporting period proving your margins cannot be manufactured in a data room.

Planning is not selling

Founders resist exit planning because it feels like committing to leave. It is not. It is building the option. A company that is ready to sell is also simply a better company: cleaner numbers, less key-person risk, stronger contracts, and a management team that runs without heroics. Every improvement on the readiness list pays you whether you sell in two years or ten. And when an unsolicited offer arrives, which in payments, fintech, and SaaS happens more often than founders expect, the prepared owner negotiates from strength while the unprepared owner scrambles or passes.

Timing the market versus timing the company

Owners often wait for the perfect market window. In our experience the company's readiness moves valuation more reliably than the market's mood. Deal cycles come and go, but a business with verified recurring revenue, low concentration, and clean books commands buyer attention in any market. The best sequencing is to get ready first, then choose your window from a position where you can say no.

Where we fit

Exit readiness consulting is one of the three things we do at 733Park, alongside sell-side and buy-side advisory. We work with companies between $5 million and $350 million in enterprise value across payments, fintech, SaaS, and AI, and the engagement is senior-led: you work directly with me on what to fix, in what order, and what each fix is worth at the closing table. Having facilitated more than $10 billion across 209+ deals, we know exactly what buyers will probe, so the preparation aims at the tests your company will actually face.

The first step takes five minutes. Get a baseline number from our free valuation calculator at 733park.com/tools/portfolio-valuation, then reach out for a confidential conversation about the gap between that number and the one you want: 733park.com/contact.

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