The Founder's Playbook · Free
What happens to your business if you are not in it for six months?
Most owners have never answered that out loud. The ones who have are usually wrong about it, and wrong in the expensive direction.
A playbook for UK founder-led businesses, roughly £5m to £50m turnover. Sixty pages, properly sourced, no sign-up call.
The problem
There is a question every adviser will ask you
Is the business ready to be sold? It's a good question. It's also only half of one.
The half that gets left out is the half that kills deals: are you ready to sell it? A business can score brilliantly on the first while its owner is nowhere near an answer to the second.
That founder is the one who reaches exclusivity and starts inventing reasons to slow it down. Or signs an earn-out that turns three years of their life into a sentence served in a company they used to own.
So the playbook is in two parts
Deliberately in this order.
Part One · You
What you actually want, what you stand to lose that money doesn't replace, and what happens to the people who stay behind. Psychological ownership, why founders blow up their own deals, and the conversation you'll have to have with your team.
Part Two · The business
What a buyer tests, the six findings that move the price, and the UK paperwork that has to be right two years out rather than two months. Registers, drag-along, personal guarantees, EMI, EIS, and the tax clock.
On the evidence
One thing you will not find in it
“75% of business owners profoundly regret selling within a year.”
Quoted across this market. Attributed to PwC.
We went looking for the original. There isn't one. No date, no sample size, no methodology. The Exit Planning Institute repeats it without a source and elsewhere quietly changes it to 70%. Their own survey, which is real, only asked owners who had not sold yet, so it cannot tell you anything about regret afterwards.
We name it in the playbook and show the working, because the number is doing a job in this market and the job is fear. Everything else we quote has a source you can check.
Inside the playbook
What is actually in it
- The evidence on life after an exit, including the Yale study nobody quotes because it is less frightening than the folklore
- How buyers test founder dependency, and the six findings that take money off the table
- What the multiples really look like by EBITDA and by sector, from UK data rather than American
- Business Asset Disposal Relief at 18% from 6 April 2026, and why a broken qualification takes two years to fix
- A timetable, from twenty-four months out to the week before exclusivity
- Questions to sit with. Not scored, and there are no right answers
Get the playbook
Free, and yours to keep.
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Already know you'd rather just talk?
Book a confidential explore call — thirty minutes, no obligation. Many founders haven't told their team, their family or their bank that they're thinking about selling. That's normal, and it's safe to talk to us before you talk to anyone else.
We prepare the business for life without the founder, and the founder for life without the business.