The work happens 36 months out, not six.

TL;DR: Most founders start preparing for exit when they decide to sell, typically six to twelve months before the LOI. The buyer is reading three years of data. The gap between what you can credibly improve in two quarters and what they need to see across thirty-six months is exactly the gap that gets priced into the discount. If you're a year out, you're not prepping. You're negotiating. The actual prep window opens three years earlier.

The standard pattern goes like this. Founder decides, usually for personal reasons, sometimes financial, that an exit is on the horizon. They hire an investment banker. They start tightening the financials. They pull together a data room. They make a list of the things they should have cleaned up over the years and start working through it.

That's fine work. It's also too late.

By the time the banker is on the phone, the buyer's diligence model is already pulling three years of historicals. They're not asking what the business looks like at the moment of the LOI. They're asking what trajectory got it there, and whether the trajectory is real or assembled.

A six-month sprint of cleanup is visible. Buyers can spot it the way a real estate agent spots fresh paint over a water stain.

The mistake isn't that founders don't know what to do. Most do. The mistake is treating the work as something that happens because you're selling, rather than something that produces a different business whether you sell or not.

Three years of explicit value-creation work, disciplined pricing, governed discounting, transferable management, audited contracts, durable customer relationships, compounds into a different company. Two quarters of cleanup compounds into a polished version of the same company.

The first one earns the multiple expansion. The second one pays for the discount the founder didn't see coming.

Three years out, you have the whole runway. You can decide what's worth fixing structurally rather than cosmetically. You can let new hires earn their authority. You can replace founder-dependent relationships with structured ones. You can run a full year of clean, well-priced revenue before the year the buyer underwrites.

Twelve months out, the runway has almost closed. You can fix the data room. You can present better. You can negotiate harder. What you can't do is change the underlying signal the buyer is reading.

This is the part most founders feel viscerally only once. The decision to start the work three years out is usually made by someone who learned the hard way at twelve.

The structured way to do this work is the Exit Ready Consult, what I and the team call the ERC Protocol. It's built specifically for founders one to five years from a sale.

The protocol is not a checklist. It's a diagnostic that produces three artifacts: an Exit Readiness Score, a quantified EBITDA Expansion Map, and a Value Creation Plan with a 12-to-36-month horizon. It runs the business through the buyer's lens, risk discount identification, transferability audit, buyer-comparable benchmarking and outputs a "sell now vs. later" analysis that almost no founder can do honestly without external eyes.

The reason it lives at the front end of the timeline, not the back, is that the recommendations only have time to compound when there's runway left. At twelve months out, the plan turns into a punch list. At thirty-six, it turns into a different company.

— Roland

The “tacos and tequila” test.

Simple rule: if you wouldn’t want to spend time with someone outside of business, you probably shouldn’t do business with them.

It sounds almost too simple… but it eliminates a surprising number of bad decisions.

I’ve seen deals, hires, and partnerships look great on paper and still turn into painful experiences because the people were wrong.

Business is hard enough already. Who you choose to work with makes it either easier… or much harder.

Want to see the simplest way to avoid bad partnerships? Watch the video below.