Buyers are back. In July 2026 alone, venture-backed M&A cleared $9 billion and twelve companies went public above a billion-dollar valuation.
Most founders will miss it. Not because they don’t want to sell. Exit readiness takes eighteen to twenty-four months — every clean exit I’ve been part of did — and most founders start the week a buyer calls.
That week is the worst possible moment to begin.
Windows Close Without Announcing It
I’ve been through this cycle enough times to know its shape. Liquidity freezes. Everyone waits. Valuations hold up on paper while nothing actually sells.
One market analysis put the problem plainly this month: higher private valuations “may improve paper returns, but they do not return capital to limited partners.”
Then the ice cracks. Acquirers who hoarded cash for two years start shopping. Bankers float the next big listings — OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, Stripe. Crunchbase read July’s mix of billion-dollar rounds, M&A, and IPOs as an ecosystem where capital “is also beginning to recycle through exits.”
Beginning. Not finished.
That word matters, because this window will close, and it will close faster than it opened. One bad quarter, one rate surprise, one geopolitical shock, and the acquirers go quiet for another two years.
Rule: You can’t time an exit window. You can only be ready when one opens.
Exit Readiness Is the Whole Game
An exit is not an event. It’s a process that starts long before anyone makes an offer, and the founders who get clean, high-multiple outcomes did the unglamorous work years earlier.
I’ve sold companies. I’ve also sat in the room where a buyer repriced a great business downward in diligence over things that would have taken six months to fix — if anyone had started six months earlier.
Nobody hands you those six months once a process is live. Every week you spend fixing something is a week the buyer spends finding a reason to pay less.
The Exit Readiness Checklist
What has to be true before the phone rings.
1. Your books survive a stranger.
Not “my bookkeeper knows where everything is.” Clean, accrual-based financials going back three years, ideally reviewed or audited. Revenue recognized consistently. Add-backs documented and defensible.
Rule: If explaining your numbers takes more than ten minutes, your valuation is already falling.
2. No customer is worth more than 20% of revenue.
Customer concentration is the fastest way to lose a turn of multiple. A buyer sees one client at 40% of revenue and sees a company that could halve the day after closing. They price that risk aggressively.
Fixing it takes years. Start now.
3. The business runs without you for thirty days.
The hardest one, and the one founders fight. If you are the salesperson, the product decision-maker, and the person approving invoices, you aren’t selling a company. You’re selling a job — and buyers pay far less for jobs.
Test it honestly. Leave for thirty days. What breaks becomes your work list.
4. Your contracts transfer.
Go read your customer agreements. Find the change-of-control clauses that let clients walk or renegotiate on acquisition. Check your key employee agreements. Check your IP assignments, especially for anything a contractor built in the early years.
I watched a deal stall four months over one missing IP assignment from a freelancer nobody could find.
5. Your growth story has a number attached.
“We’re growing fast” is not a story. “We grew 62% year over year for three consecutive years with net revenue retention of 114%” is a story. Buyers pay more for predictability than for velocity.
6. You know your walk-away number before you enter the room.
Decide it while you’re calm. Write it down. Once a term sheet sits in front of you, excitement, exhaustion, and eight months of sunk cost wreck your judgment.
Rule: Set your floor before the adrenaline arrives.
The Mistake I See Most
Founders treat the exit as the reward for building. It isn’t. It’s a separate discipline with its own skill set, and it sits third in Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat. for a reason — between scaling and starting again, and you have to earn it deliberately.
The founders who do this well aren’t smarter. They ran the business as if it were for sale, every year, whether or not it was.
That habit has a side effect: a company built to be sold is a better company to own. Clean books, diversified revenue, a team that operates without you. None of that is exit prep. That’s just good business.
The Item You’ve Been Avoiding
Go back through those six. One of them made you flinch.
That’s the one costing you a turn of multiple, and it’s the one you’ve been deferring for two years because fixing it means an uncomfortable conversation — with your largest customer, with your accountant, with the person who shouldn’t be running your sales team anymore.
Book that conversation this week. Not the easy items. The one you skipped.
The window is open now. The work should have started two years ago.
Second best time is today.