Most of what determines the outcome happens years before a process begins, and most owners start thinking about it eighteen months too late.
Start a private conversation with the Acquisition Concierge, already scoped to preparing to sell. Choose the question closest to yours, or describe your situation directly.
Selling a private company is not principally a financial event, though it is usually treated as one. It is the end of a role, frequently of an identity, and it commits the livelihoods of people the owner hired personally to somebody else's judgment. It is also, financially, the single largest transaction most owners ever undertake, decided in a market where they have no experience and the counterparty has a great deal. This part of the Institute exists for owners who are considering a sale, including, and especially, those who are years away and merely want to understand the landscape. There is nothing here about listing a business. The material is about deciding whether selling is the right answer at all, what genuinely raises value, how buyers will assess what you have built, and what the years afterward are actually like.
Three questions, in the order they usually matter. The last one is the one most owners are given least help with.
Full sale, partial liquidity, recapitalization, management buyout, employee ownership or succession, the options before the process.
investigateThe preparation that genuinely changes what a buyer will pay, and how long each item actually takes.
investigateThe transition period, the non-compete, seller regret, and the question of what you do next, the part nobody prepares owners for.
investigateHow the Institute helps an owner considering a sale. It does not list businesses, solicit buyers, or act as a broker.
Two to three years before you want to transact, which is considerably earlier than most owners begin. The items that most raise value take that long: reducing customer concentration, building a management layer beneath you, converting project revenue toward recurring, cleaning up financial reporting, and disentangling personal expenses from the business. An owner who decides to sell and begins a process within six months is generally selling the business as it happens to be, and accepting a buyer's discount for every issue that could have been resolved with time.
Reducing how much the business depends on you. Buyers are purchasing transferable earnings, and every relationship, decision or piece of knowledge that lives only with the owner is earnings that may not transfer. A business with a genuine management layer, documented processes and customer relationships held by the company rather than by one person is worth materially more than an identical business that runs through its founder, and, not coincidentally, is far easier to sell at all. This is also the change that takes longest, which is why it argues for starting early.
No, and the range of options is wider than most owners realize. Strategic buyers, private equity platforms, add-on acquisitions by a sponsor-backed company, family offices, search funds and independent sponsors, management buyouts, employee ownership structures, or a gradual transfer to family are all genuinely different in what they mean for price, structure, your ongoing role and what happens to your staff. Owners who only ever consider one route frequently discover afterward that another would have suited their actual priorities better.
Carefully, and with fewer people than feels natural. Early exploration, understanding value drivers, getting your reporting in order, thinking about timing, can be done entirely privately, and much of the preparation work is indistinguishable from simply running the business better. Where you involve advisers, use confidentiality agreements and keep the circle small: staff who suspect a sale start looking, and competitors who hear about it will tell your customers. This is a genuine argument for beginning the preparation years before any process, when nothing you are doing looks like a sale.
Describe where you are. The Concierge will orient you, with no assumption that you are selling, and no process to enter.