Your multiple isn't a negotiation. It is a score you can calculate before they do.

TL;DR: Founders treat their exit multiple as something they negotiate at the table. It isn't. Buyers are scoring your business against a rubric long before an offer, and Roland built a version of it: the Rule of 100. Four things, twenty-five points each, revenue growth, profit margin, retention and recurrence, and operational maturity. Your score maps to a multiple, from two or three times earnings at the bottom to fifteen or twenty-five at the top. The gap between your score today and where you want it is not a feeling. It is a number, and it is usually worth millions.

When founders picture their exit, they picture the negotiation. The back and forth, the banker, the moment someone finally says a number and you decide whether to take it. So they prepare to haggle, as if the multiple were something you could talk a buyer into.

It isn't. By the time you are at the table, the multiple is mostly already set, because the buyer has been scoring your business against a rubric since the first meeting. They are not guessing what you are worth. They are grading you. The useful part is that the rubric is knowable, which means you can run it on yourself long before they ever do.

Roland built a version of that rubric to replace the confusing patchwork buyers actually use, the Rule of 40 for software, a different yardstick for roll-ups, another for services. He calls it the Rule of 100. One hundred points, four quadrants, twenty-five points each.

The first is revenue growth. The second is EBITDA margin, how much of that revenue you actually keep. The third is retention and recurrence, whether your revenue comes back on its own or has to be won again every year. The fourth is operational maturity, whether the business runs on documented systems and a real team or on you and a few people's memories. Score each out of twenty-five and add them up. Most founders have deliberately optimized exactly none of the four. They chased revenue because revenue is visible, and let the other three drift.

The reason this matters is that the score is not academic. It maps to a multiple. A business under forty out of a hundred trades at two to three times earnings. Push into the sixties and seventies and you are at five to seven. The rare businesses that score in the nineties trade at fifteen to twenty-five times the same earnings. Same profit, a wildly different price, set almost entirely by the four numbers.

Each tier is really a different class of buyer. Under forty you are a fixer-upper, priced for the risk. In the sixties you are ready for private equity. In the nineties you are the business a roll-up calls gold. That is why two companies with identical EBITDA sell for completely different amounts. It was never about the earnings. It was about the score behind them, and most founders never calculate it, so they walk into the room not knowing the number the buyer already has.

Here is what the rubric gives you that a negotiation never could. It turns “make the business more valuable” from a vague ambition into arithmetic. If you score a forty-five today and you could get to a seventy-five, that is not a feeling. On two million dollars of EBITDA it is roughly the difference between a seven million dollar business and a fourteen million dollar one. A thirty-point move is seven million dollars. On ten million of EBITDA, the same move is worth thirty-five.

And unlike the negotiation, this part is entirely in your control. Each of the four numbers is a project, each project moves the score, and each point on the score moves the multiple. None of it can be done in the ninety days after an offer lands, which is exactly why the founders who score well started years before anyone made them one.

You do not have to wait for a buyer to hand you the number. The short version of this exact rubric is free. The Exit-Ready Score runs the four quadrants in about three minutes, on the same screens a private equity buyer uses, and gives you your score, the multiple it implies, and the specific gaps pulling it down.

Take it before anyone makes you an offer and you walk into every conversation already knowing the number the buyer is about to calculate, and exactly which of the four to fix first. Get your Exit-Ready Score, free, then use the four quadrants above to close the gap.

— Roland

Most owners focus on increasing their valuation.

They're chasing the wrong goal. The real objective isn't a bigger valuation. It's attracting a better buyer.

At a certain point, something interesting happens. You stop competing for the attention of smaller buyers and start attracting an entirely different class of acquirer.

And that changes everything.

Not because your business is fundamentally different...But because the people bidding on it are.

Want to see why the right buyer is worth more than a higher valuation? Watch the video below.