Exit Ready: An Honest Conversation

Most founders start planning their exit a couple of years later than they should have.

You might have no plans to sell. You might be a decade away. But at some point your business will change hands - to a buyer, a partner, a family member, or whoever comes next - and the owners who come out of that well are the ones who started preparing long before an offer was on the table. A lot of that preparation also makes the business easier to run in the meantime.

This lunch panel brings together three people who work on different parts of a sale and have seen hundreds of them play out. Sarah Grossman owns BayState Business Brokers and has guided more than a hundred owners through a sale, many of them family-owned and multi-generational businesses. She can tell you what buyers are looking for and where deals tend to fall apart. Justin Nelson is a Partner in Transaction Advisory at Kahn Litwin, where he runs due diligence and Quality of Earnings work on deals between $2 million and $150 million. If you ever sell, someone like Justin will be going through your financials line by line. Andrew Sherman is a Partner at Brown Rudnick and has written 26 books on business growth and deal-making, including Mergers and Acquisitions from A to Z. He has taught business growth strategy at Georgetown and the University of Maryland for decades.

We’ve asked all three to be candid. What do owners get wrong about what their company is worth? What comes up in diligence that nobody saw coming? When should you bring in a broker, an advisor, or a lawyer, and at what point is it too late for them to help? Bring your own questions - we’ve set aside plenty of time for them.

Doors open at 11:30 for lunch. The panel and Q&A run from 12:00 to 1:30, and we’ll stay until 2:30 so you can keep talking with the panelists and each other. Brown Rudnick is hosting us at One Financial Center.

Whether you sell in two years or twenty, you’ll leave with a clearer idea of what being ready involves and where your business stands today.

>> EO Members Register Here <<  [Accelerators: please see below]

>> SAPs and Non-Members: please email admin@eoboston.org to register <<

This event is open to EO Members and EO Strategic Alliance Partners only. Accelerators can request to join the waitlist by contacting admin@eoboston.org and will be invited if space allows closer to the event date.