by Scott Sylvan Bell | Mar 18, 2026 | podcast
Most business owners structure their financials to minimize taxes. That strategy works well right up until the moment they try to sell. When a buyer opens your data room and finds inconsistent reporting, personal expenses buried in the P&L, and revenue...
by scottsylvan | Mar 15, 2026 | Uncategorized
Most business owners spend years building something valuable and about six months thinking about how to sell it. That gap is why the majority of exits underperform. Before you talk to a broker, before you run numbers, you need to understand what the five exit...
by scottsylvan | Mar 9, 2026 | Uncategorized
If the business cannot run without you, it will not sell without you. Buyers and investors pay premiums for independence, not indispensability. Founder dependency is when decisions, relationships, approvals, and deliveries revolve around you. The company is...
by scottsylvan | Mar 9, 2026 | Uncategorized
One customer or one relationship should never control your exit. What feels like a strong relationship — one you have built and protected for years — signals fragility to every buyer who opens your books. Concentration risk is a technical term for a specific problem:...
by scottsylvan | Mar 9, 2026 | Uncategorized
Multiples are not arbitrary numbers. They are risk shorthand. When a buyer quotes you a multiple, what they are really communicating is their confidence score — how certain they are that the earnings and continuity of the business will hold after the handoff. Price...
by scottsylvan | Mar 9, 2026 | Uncategorized
Exit is a transition, not a transformation. If you wait until you are ready to sell to fix the business, buyers will see an unfinished product and price it like a turnaround. The DRIVER test and SCALE framework inside the Exit Ratio 360™ evaluate the specific growth...
by scottsylvan | Mar 9, 2026 | Uncategorized
When a buyer says “too much risk” — they are not being vague. They are telling you exactly what they found. Every ding and dent in a mid-market deal has a name, a category, and a formula that converts it into a dollar amount subtracted from your multiple....
by scottsylvan | Mar 9, 2026 | Uncategorized
Two businesses with identical revenue, identical EBITDA, and identical growth trajectories can attract completely different levels of buyer interest based solely on how they are positioned in their market. Market positioning is not a marketing concept — in M&A it...
by scottsylvan | Mar 9, 2026 | Uncategorized
Most exit plans fail before the owner ever goes to market. Not because the business was not valuable — but because the plan was built on assumptions instead of evidence, started too late, or was handed to advisors who were evaluating pieces of the business instead of...
by scottsylvan | Mar 9, 2026 | Uncategorized
If the business stops when you stop, you do not own a business. You own a job with overhead. That one line is the entire difference between a lifestyle business and an asset — and it determines everything about what happens when you try to sell. A lifestyle business...
