Your business is your wealth. Whether crisis is forcing the conversation or you're planning ahead, here's what exit planning actually means for founders like you.
Exit planning starts the moment something changes. A divorce filing. A health scare. A partner who wants out. An acquisition offer you didn't expect. Or just the quiet realization that you've been running this business for fifteen years and you're tired.
Most founders think exit planning means "I want to sell." That's one version, but it's not even the most common one. The reality is that exit planning is what happens when your relationship with your business changes. That change can be forced on you by crisis or chosen because an opportunity appeared. Either way, most businesses aren't ready for it. The owner is the business. The revenue depends on their presence. The customers know them personally. The team can't function without daily direction. When your circumstances change and you need options, a business like that gives you none.
According to the Exit Planning Institute, roughly 80% of businesses that go to market never sell. Not because there aren't buyers, but because the businesses aren't transferable. They're high-paying jobs disguised as companies. The owner is the product, the salesperson, the manager, and the strategy all wrapped into one. Remove them and what's left isn't worth buying.
This is what exit planning actually means: building a business that gives you choices when your circumstances change. Because they will change. They always do.
Some founders come to exit planning because they want to. Others come because they have to. The crisis scenarios are where most people realize their business is a prison, not an asset.
The business is almost always the largest marital asset, and in most states your spouse is entitled to half of it. But half of what? That's where things get complicated. If the business can't run without you, the valuation will reflect that. If you can't prove recurring revenue or show that customers would stick around after you leave, the appraiser is going to assign a low multiple. You end up in a brutal position where the business is simultaneously your livelihood and the thing your spouse's attorney is trying to claim half of.
We've seen this play out too many times. A founder facing divorce with a business that should be worth $3M on paper, but the valuation comes back at $800K because everything runs through the owner. The choice becomes buying out your spouse at a low number (which feels like a win until you realize the business is still a prison) or selling quickly at a discount that hurts everyone. Neither option is good when the business isn't transferable.
The founders who come out of divorce with their business intact are the ones who started building transferability before the crisis hit. They had systems. They had a team that could operate independently. They had a plan for exactly this scenario.
A heart attack. A cancer diagnosis. Burnout so severe it becomes a medical event. When your health fails, a business that requires your personal presence stops generating income almost immediately. There's no buffer. No system to absorb the shock. Your clients call and nobody picks up. Your team starts making decisions they're not qualified for. Revenue starts sliding within weeks.
Consider a founder who has a stroke. Before the stroke, the business did $4M in revenue. Ninety days later, it had lost 60% of that because every client relationship was personal, every major decision ran through one person, and nobody else knew how the critical systems worked. Insurance covers medical bills. It doesn't replace the revenue your business loses while you're recovering.
The question every founder should ask themselves: if you couldn't work for six months, would your business survive? If the answer is no, you don't have a business. You have a job that disappears the moment you can't show up. Health crisis exit planning is about building the resilience to survive that test.
You started the business together. Equal partners, complementary skills, a shared vision that made perfect sense at the time. But ten years later, one partner wants aggressive growth while the other wants a lifestyle business. Or one partner is putting in seventy hours a week while the other shows up at ten and leaves at three. The tension becomes a daily feature of running the company.
Two 50/50 partners in a deadlock is one of the most destructive forces in business. Decisions stall. Employees take sides. Customers sense the dysfunction. And the buy-sell agreement you signed at founding, if you even have one, probably hasn't been updated since the business was worth a fraction of what it is today. Neither partner can afford to buy the other out, and neither wants to sell at a price the other considers fair.
The result is a slow-motion value destruction that hurts both parties. Partner conflict exit planning requires an objective third party who can create a shared baseline of value and model realistic scenarios that actually work financially.
Nobody wants to think about this one, so almost nobody plans for it. A 58-year-old founder dies without a succession plan. The family inherits a business they can't run. Estate taxes come due within nine months. The business loses value the moment the founder isn't there, because the founder was the business. What should have been a $2M inheritance becomes a $200K distressed asset that the family sells for whatever they can get just to cover the tax obligation.
This isn't a rare scenario. It happens constantly, and the families left behind bear the full weight of decisions that should have been made years earlier. The inheritance isn't wealth. It's stress, debt, and a fire sale. A transferable business is the greatest gift you can leave your family, and building one requires the same work whether you plan to sell or not.
Technology shifts. New competitors emerge with fundamentally different cost structures. Regulations change overnight. The business model that worked for twenty years starts showing cracks, and you can feel the window for a good exit closing month by month. An agency founder watches AI tools start replacing the services their team delivers. Revenue is fine today. But they can see 18 to 24 months out, and the trajectory isn't good. The choice is clear: transform the business model now or exit while the business still has value to a buyer.
Market disruption creates a unique urgency because the business might look healthy on paper right now, but sophisticated buyers can read the same trends you can. The time to sell is while the business is still performing, not after revenue has started declining.
This one is the quietest crisis, and maybe the most common. Fifteen years in. Still working sixty-hour weeks. Can't take a real vacation because the business falls apart when you're gone. Making $500K a year, which sounds great until you realize you can't sell the business because it's not really a business. It's a high-paying job with overhead. The golden handcuffs are real: you make too much to walk away, but you've built something that nobody else would buy.
The prison you built looks like success from the outside. Inside it's exhaustion, resentment, and the slow dawning realization that you're trapped. The good news is that burnout exits, unlike health crises or divorce, usually come with the gift of time. You're tired, not dying. You have the runway to build transferability if you start now.
These aren't edge cases. This is the reality for most founder-led businesses. The crisis doesn't announce itself. It just arrives. And if your business isn't transferable, you have no options.
Not every exit planning conversation starts with crisis. Some founders plan ahead. They see the opportunity and position themselves to capture it.
This is the scenario most founders imagine when they think about exit planning. You're 55 or 60. You want to retire by 65. You have time to do it right. The founder who starts building systems at 55 and sells at 60 for 4.2x EBITDA instead of 2.1x isn't luckier. They just started earlier. The difference between intentional preparation and reactive scramble is usually about a million dollars in sale price, sometimes more.
Retirement exit planning is the luxury scenario. You have time to move every driver. You can reduce owner dependency gradually. You can transition customer relationships over years instead of weeks. Time is the most valuable asset in exit planning, and retirement is the one scenario where you actually have enough of it.
A competitor or PE firm shows up with an unsolicited offer. You've never thought about selling. You have no idea what your business is actually worth. You have 90 days to respond, no preparation, and a number on the table that sounds either amazing or insulting depending on the day. A founder gets an $1.8M offer. Sounds reasonable. Turns out the business is worth $3.5M after a proper valuation. The difference: knowing your value before someone else tries to tell you what it is.
The founders who capture the best acquisition outcomes are the ones who can walk away from the table. That leverage only exists when you know your numbers, your business is transferable, and you're not desperate to sell.
Your son or daughter wants to take over. This should be the best possible outcome: keeping the business in the family, preserving the legacy, creating generational wealth. But most family successions fail, and they fail because the founder transfers a dependent business, not a transferable one. The next generation inherits all of dad's problems plus the pressure of proving they belong.
The gift isn't the business itself. The gift is a transferable business with documented systems, a capable team, diversified revenue, and a clear path forward that doesn't depend on the founder's personal relationships and institutional knowledge. When you transfer that, the business grows 40% during transition instead of shrinking. When you transfer a dependent business, the next generation drowns.
Some founders don't want to sell. They want to step back. Hire a CEO. Become chairman. Work fifteen hours a week instead of sixty and still collect distributions. This is the "Love It" path, and it requires the same transferability work as selling. You can't step back from a business that needs you for every decision. But build the right systems, hire the right people, and something counterintuitive happens: revenue often increases when the founder steps back. The team stops waiting for permission and starts executing.
The opportunity scenarios only work if your business is ready. You can't manufacture transferability in 90 days. It takes 18 to 36 months to build real value.
Every exit planning conversation eventually comes down to one decision. Do you want to transform this business or transfer it? The language we use is simple: Love It or List It. Love It means you keep the business but escape the prison. You build systems that let the company run without you. You hire a COO or GM, step into a chairman role, and let the team execute. The business becomes an asset that generates income and appreciates in value instead of a job that demands your presence fifty or sixty hours a week. The timeline is usually 18 to 36 months of real work, and the counterintuitive result is that revenue often grows once the founder gets out of the way.
List It means you want to exit within two to five years. The goal is maximizing business value for sale. You focus on the same 8 Drivers of Company Value, cleaning up financials, building recurring revenue, reducing customer concentration, developing a management team, but the end state is a transaction. You spend two to three years building value, then go to market in a position of strength instead of desperation. The founder who spends 24 months building systems sells for 4.1x EBITDA. The one who lists tomorrow sells for 2.3x. Same business, different preparation.
Here's the thing that surprises most founders: both paths require exactly the same work. Building a transferable business is the work. Whether you keep it or sell it is just a decision you make at the end. Many founders start on the Love It path and realize they want to List It. Others start planning a sale and discover that, once the business stops demanding their constant presence, they actually enjoy owning it again. That's fine. A transferable business gives you options. A non-transferable business gives you nothing.
The work is the same. Build a business that doesn't need you. Then decide what you want to do with it.
Exit planning looks different in Kansas City than it does in Silicon Valley or New York. The businesses are different. The timelines are different. The exit options are different. KC metro has a strong culture of family businesses, second and third generation companies built by people who value stability over hypergrowth. Service businesses dominate the landscape: professional services, agencies, B2B services, distribution companies, manufacturing. These are real businesses with real revenue and real employees, not venture-backed moonshots chasing unicorn valuations.
Valuations here typically run 2 to 4x EBITDA, not 10 to 15x revenue like tech companies in coastal markets. Buyers are typically strategic, meaning competitors or employees, not financial buyers like PE firms or venture capitalists. The local M&A market is focused on $1M to $10M deals, not $50M and above. This means preparation matters more, not less. There's no "grow at all costs and someone will overpay" exit path in Kansas City. The buyers here are sophisticated operators who understand exactly what they're buying and won't overpay for risk.
Consider a Kansas City marketing agency doing $3M in revenue. Owner-dependent. Gets offered 1.8x EBITDA. Spends two years building systems, recurring revenue, reducing customer concentration. Sells for 3.9x EBITDA. The difference between those two outcomes: $1.2M versus $2.8M. Same business. Just transferable.
The advantage for Kansas City founders who prepare: less competition for good buyers. The disadvantage: buyers here are experienced and won't overpay for a business that depends on the seller sticking around.
We work with founder-led businesses across the entire Kansas City metro, including Overland Park, Leawood, Olathe, Lee's Summit, Kansas City North, Lenexa, Shawnee, Prairie Village, Gladstone, Liberty, Blue Springs, Independence, Mission, and Merriam.
We know the market, the buyers, the valuations, and the exit paths that actually work here.
Browse by county:
We don't do traditional exit planning. Most exit planners are wealth advisors or M&A brokers who get involved at the end, when you've already decided to sell and need someone to manage the transaction. We get involved at the beginning, when you're deciding Love It or List It, before the crisis forces your hand.
Our founder, Kevin Oldham, is a CEPA (Certified Exit Planning Advisor) and Certified Value Builder. He built and failed to exit his own marketing agency. Sat on the kitchen floor one night and realized the business he'd built wasn't an asset. It was a prison. He spent three years building Diffactory to solve the problem he couldn't solve for himself. Thirty-plus angel investments through BetaBlox gave him the pattern recognition to see what makes businesses transferable and what keeps founders trapped.
We start with the Reality Check. It costs $997 and takes a full session. We run the complete Value Builder assessment, scoring your business across all 8 Drivers of Company Value. We guide you through it. No homework. No self-assessment delusion. We don't trust founders to evaluate their own business objectively because nobody can. You'll see your scores. You'll see the gaps. You'll see exactly what needs to change before you have real options. Then you decide: Love It or List It.
After the Reality Check, there are three paths. Founder HQ is our free community for founders who want to learn but aren't ready to commit. Founder HQ Masters at $997 per month is the 12-month group program with monthly implementation sessions, weekly check-ins, and accountability for founders committed to transformation. And for founders with the revenue and complexity that demands custom work, we offer one-on-one engagements.
The difference between us and everyone else: we provide the proven plan and the accountability to execute it. Most founders have neither.
Exit planning isn't about the transaction. It's about building a business that gives you options when your life changes.
"Kevin's knowledge put us in a position to reach markets that we hadn't ever reached before. He was worth 10 times what we paid him..."
— Dave & Jacci Brattin, Exited Owners of Armstrong-Citywide Hardwood Flooring
"I thought I was on the right path. I was actually on a path to chaos. Kevin 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
"Beyond business insight, Kevin provides the grounding you need when entrepreneurship gets turbulent. Every major decision he's guided has led to profitability. Not by accident, but by design."
— Mark DeGrasse, Founder of AI Branding Academy
The best time was 10 years ago. The second best time is now. Most founders wait until crisis forces the conversation, whether that's divorce, a health scare, or an acquisition offer that catches them flat-footed. By then it's too late to build real transferability. If you're thinking about exiting in the next 5 to 10 years, start now. If you're not thinking about it at all, start now anyway, because your business should be transferable whether you exit or not.
For most founder-led service businesses, 18 to 36 months of focused work. That's not 18 months of minor tweaks. It's systematically fixing the 8 Drivers of Company Value. Building recurring revenue models. Reducing customer concentration. Documenting processes. Hiring and developing a number two. You can't shortcut this. Buyers aren't stupid. They know the difference between real transferability and cosmetic changes.
Then you need exit planning even more. Exit planning isn't about selling. It's about building a business that can transfer. That includes transferring to your family, your employees, or just transferring operations to a hired CEO while you stay as owner. Every founder eventually exits their business, even if it's just retirement or death. The question is whether you exit with options or without them.
Impossible to say without assessment. But here's reality for KC metro service businesses: if you're heavily owner-dependent, probably 1.5 to 2.5x EBITDA. If you have some systems and recurring revenue, probably 2.5 to 3.5x EBITDA. If you're genuinely transferable with diversified revenue and a strong number two, probably 3.5 to 5x EBITDA. The multiple matters more than revenue. A $2M business at 4x is worth more than a $3M business at 2x.
Exit planner first, broker later. Brokers list businesses that are ready to sell. We make businesses ready to sell. If you call a broker today with an owner-dependent business, they'll either turn you away or tell you to fix things first. We fix things first. Then when you're ready, we refer you to brokers who specialize in your industry and deal size. Different roles, different timing.
Succession planning is one type of exit planning. Exit planning is the broader category, covering any scenario where ownership or control transfers. Succession planning specifically means transferring to family or employees. Both require the same foundation: a transferable business. The difference is who you're transferring to, not what you're transferring.
Technically yes, realistically no. Most founders can't see what they can't see. You're too close to your business to self-assess accurately. You'll convince yourself your business is more transferable than it is. You'll skip the hard work. You'll avoid the uncomfortable conversations. This is why the Reality Check exists, to force external objectivity. If you could do this yourself, you would have already done it.
Most founders think they know their business value. They're wrong. They think they're exit-ready. They're not. They think they have time. They don't.
The Reality Check exists to force the truth. It's a complete Value Builder assessment, the same system used by exit planners worldwide to measure transferability across all 8 Drivers of Company Value. We guide you through it in 90 minutes. No homework. No self-assessment delusion. Just data on where you actually stand.
You'll see your scores. You'll see the gaps. You'll see what needs to change before you have real options. Then you decide: Love It or List It. Transform or transfer. Either way, you'll know what needs to happen.