The Wilmington Business Journal recently covered the launch of IQExit, a company I co-founded with three colleagues. Several readers reached out asking how the idea formed. The answer is that I watched a pattern repeat for more than a decade and formed a conviction that earlier recognition changes everything. This column is a reset: going forward, I’ll write at the intersection of advising owners directly and equipping the advisors who sit alongside them.
A few years ago, a southeast manufacturer with roughly $18 million in revenue was approached by a strategic acquirer. The owner believed he was ready. The financials looked clean on the surface. His CPA was capable. His banker knew the business well. He had every reason to feel confident.
Three issues surfaced in week two of the buyer’s diligence: customer concentration above 40 percent, no second-tier management documented, and a lease expiring in 18 months with no renewal in place. The buyer’s counsel found all three. The deal was repriced by $2.1 million.
None of those issues were fatal. Every one of them was addressable with time. Time was the only thing missing.
The Pattern
Over more than a decade advising founders through ownership transitions across the Carolinas and Virginia, I watched that scene repeat itself with uncomfortable consistency. A business owner, someone who had spent 20 or 30 years building something valuable would finally decide it was time. They’d call their CPA, their banker, maybe a broker. And within weeks, the process would begin to reveal what earlier preparation would have prevented.
Not because the business wasn’t good. Because the advisors surrounding that owner, capable, trusted, often long-tenured, engaged after the preparation window had closed. After expectations had formed privately. After decisions had been made. After the issues that would cost the seller money had become a buyer’s discovery rather than the seller’s own.
Only about one in four businesses that formally go to market actually close.
When three-quarters of sellers don’t reach the finish line, the variable isn’t execution quality.
It’s timing.
What We Built
Last week, the Wilmington Business Journal covered the launch of IQExit, a company I co-founded with three partners. IQExit is built around a single conviction: that business owners and their advisors need a structured way to see a company through a buyer’s lens — not when a sale process starts, but years earlier and over time.
We call IQExit’s structured framework “exit readiness intelligence”. It sets early expectations for what a business can be sold for and as importantly, benchmarks the business against the criteria sophisticated acquirers actually use, including comparable businesses. This is where valuation conversations realistically begin. These critical early conversations bring to the surface issues like the customer concentration risk, the owner-dependency gaps, the financial normalization work, the legal and operational vulnerabilities before a buyer’s deal team finds them. And IQExit gives the advisors surrounding a business owner – the CPAs, commercial bankers, wealth advisors, M&A attorneys, and business brokers – a shared framework for having the preparation conversation a year or two upstream from the M&A process. It re-structures the historically habitual process that has proven ineffectual.
I’ve written M&A Insights columns for the Wilmington Business Journal for over a year. This one is a reset. Going forward, columns will examine what exit readiness looks like in practice for owners and for every advisor sitting alongside them – and provide insight not as a solo M&A advisor describing deal patterns, but as someone who now sits at the intersection of advising owners directly and equipping the professionals around them to have better conversations earlier.
I’ll write for the CPA who manages a client’s financials and recognizes something a buyer will eventually question; for the commercial banker who sees the balance sheet quarterly and knows the business is maturing toward a transition; for the wealth advisor whose retirement model depends on an exit multiple that no one has yet validated; for the M&A attorney called in after the LOI is signed, wondering why the preparation didn’t happen sooner.
And I’ll write for the business owners themselves, the founders who built real companies and deserve a process that reflects their investment, and one that leads to a successful transaction.
Solving the Problem
A business owner came to me after a deal had already collapsed. The buyer walked away during diligence, citing undocumented IP assignments and a management team that couldn’t speak to operational continuity. The advisors involved were capable. They simply didn’t have the visibility or the runway to address what a buyer’s team eventually found. Two years of earlier attention would have closed both gaps. Instead, the owner restarted in a worse rate environment, with diminished leverage and a narrower buyer pool.
That’s the outcome this column will work to prevent. Not by mapping a transaction but by building the shared fluency between business owners and their advisors that changes what happens in the years before a transaction begins.
For the Advisors Reading This
You are often the first professional in the room when a founder starts sending exit signals. The questions they ask about what their business is worth, compensation structure, about whether to pay down debt, about what happens to the business if something happens to them are not financial planning questions. Those are exit questions wearing financial planning clothes.
When you hear these questions, the most valuable thing you can offer isn’t a referral to a process. It’s a referral to preparation – early, structured, honest preparation – that uncovers what a buyer will eventually find and gives the owner time to address it on their own terms.
Earlier recognition changes outcomes. That’s not a product pitch. It’s what the data and the deals keep confirming.
Tully Ryan is CEO of IQExit and an M&A Advisor with Murphy Business. He serves business owners and the advisors – CPAs, bankers, wealth advisors, and attorneys – who sit alongside them.
Tully Ryan welcomes questions, comments, and conversations from business owners and their advisors.
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