Love or List
Your Company
We help you fix your company or leave on your terms.
of businesses listed for sale never sell. Not because they're bad businesses. Because the owners were exit-minded but not exit-ready. Nobody helped them close that gap.
companies we've helped founders either transform or exit since we started keeping count.
in revenue. That's the range where this problem lives. Big enough to matter. Small enough that it all still runs through one person.
Here's what nobody tells you about building a company.
You wanted freedom. You got a job you can't quit.
That's what happens to almost every founder who's any good at what they do. You got good at the work, so more work came. You hired people, but they still need you for every decision. You became the bottleneck in the thing you built to set you free.
This is the part where most founders do one of two things. They either burn out and sell for whatever they can get. Or they keep grinding and tell themselves it'll get better next quarter.
There's a third option. But it requires seeing the problem clearly first.
We know this because we've been the founder on the wrong end of it.
This isn't consulting theory. Our founder has built companies three times. He's also watched a few family businesses close with nothing to show for the decades of work. Built companies, sold companies, and learned most of what matters the hard way.
We also spent 20+ years in recovery, earned a black belt in taekwondo, and built an angel portfolio of 30+ startups. That sounds like a weird combination until you realize they all teach the same thing: you can't fix what you won't look at honestly, you need a proven system, and you need someone in your corner who won't let you lie to yourself.
We do this work because we know what it's like to love something you built and simultaneously feel trapped by it. And we know what it takes to change that.
"Diffactory's knowledge put us in a position to reach markets that we hadn't ever reached before. They were worth 10 times what we paid them..."
— Dave & Jacci Brattin, Exited Owners, Armstrong-Citywide Hardwood Flooring
"I thought I was on the right path. I was actually on a path to chaos. Diffactory helped me systemize our agency, remove the 'Adam does everything' bottleneck, and turn what I had into a business with real, transferable assets."
— Adam McChesney, Founder of Builders of Authority
"I woke up one morning in January, stared at my task list, and just said 'I'm done.' I had hope and vision but no idea what to do with it. Then I found Diffactory."
— Jason Vance, Founder of Red Mill Creative Inc.
"It's scary to think about what decisions I might have made and where I'd be stuck right now without the structure, support, and frameworks Diffactory and this group provided."
— Molly Lopez, Founder of Sparo Marketing
"Diffactory completely changed my relationship with money. I'm now tracking every dollar, anticipating cash flow weeks ahead, and planning for things like five-Friday payroll months before they hit. That's a different business than I was running before."
— David Marks, Founder of Quality Automotive
Founder-Led
Businesses.
$250K–$20M+
You run a business. You're good at it. Maybe too good, because now the whole thing depends on you showing up every day.
Here's the test: if you disappeared for three months, would the business still be standing when you got back? If the honest answer is "probably not," that's not a character flaw. It's a structural problem. And structural problems have structural solutions.
If you're a business broker, CPA, wealth advisor, or M&A professional, you already know this founder. They come to you wanting to sell, but the business isn't ready. Or they come to you burned out, and you're not sure how to help beyond the transaction. That's where we come in. We're the step before the step you're good at.
Two paths. One principle.
Every founder we work with faces the same fork in the road. We call it Love It or List It.
Love It
We rebuild the business so it doesn't need you in the middle of everything. We fix the owner dependency, build systems that hold, install the kind of recurring revenue and team structure that makes a company worth running again.
Most founders who go through this end up keeping their business and actually enjoying it for the first time in years.
List It
The business has run its course for you, and that's fine. No shame in it. But instead of limping to a broker and hoping for the best, we get the business ready first. We make it transferable, valuable, and attractive to the right buyer.
Then we help you assemble the team (broker, legal, financial) to get you the outcome you actually deserve.
The principle underneath both paths is the same: a business is worth what it can do without you.
What changes.
The company stops being a job you own and starts being an asset you control.
You go from being the person who has to answer every question to the person who chooses which questions to answer. Revenue becomes more predictable. The team starts solving problems without escalating everything to your desk. A buyer, or a future version of you, can look at the business and see something that works on its own.
That's not magic. It's just what happens when you systematically remove yourself as the single point of failure.
A note for the advisors in the room.
If you're a business broker, you don't have a deal flow problem. You have a deal quality problem. Half the businesses that come to you are exit-minded but not exit-ready. They come to you wanting to sell, but the business can't support the transaction.
We fix that before it gets to you. We take the founder through the work of building transferable value, cleaning up the dependency issues, and getting the business into shape so that when it hits your desk, it's actually sellable.
Same principle applies if you're a CPA or wealth advisor watching a client pour everything into a business that has no exit strategy. We're the conversation you've been wanting to have with them but didn't have a solution to point to.
We're not competing with you. We're the step that makes your step work better.
The first step is a conversation.
No pitch deck. No pressure. We'll talk about where your business is, where you want it to be, and whether we're the right people to help you get there.
If we're not, we'll tell you. We'd rather send you to the right person than waste both our time.