PE Has a Playbook. You Don’t. You’re Starting From Behind.
Most owners I talk to have the same blind spot — and it costs them BIG TIME at the closing table.
The owner who built a $10M to $250M business spent twenty or thirty years learning the operation. The product. The team. The customers. The numbers that matter on a Tuesday morning. The relationships that took a decade to earn and would take a decade to replace.
Then a private equity firm shows up.
The PE firm has run this play four hundred times. They know which line items they’ll discount. They know which growth stories they’ll discount harder. They know which operational gaps trigger which deductions on the offer sheet. They have a checklist, a scoring rubric, and a walk-away number — all decided before the first meeting ever happens.
You walk in with the business.
Here’s what gets misunderstood about that moment. PE firms aren’t evil. They’re prepared. They’ve done this hundreds of times. They have analysts, models, comparable transactions, and post-acquisition operators who already know what they’ll change once the deal closes. They show up with a system because the system works — for them. Their job is to buy well. Yours is to sell well. And right now only one side of the table has done the homework.
That’s the asymmetry. And the gap between what the business is worth and what you walk away with is where the asymmetry lives. Sometimes that gap is fifteen percent. Sometimes it’s forty. The owners who feel it hardest are the ones who didn’t know the gap was there until the offer sheet hit the table — and by then, the leverage to close it was gone.
Most advisors don’t close that gap. Most brokers don’t either. They run the deal. They don’t prepare you for the deal. The work that closes the gap happens twelve to thirty-six months before the deal sheet shows up — long before the broker is in the room, long before the LOI gets drafted, long before the buyer’s diligence team starts pulling threads.
Exit Ratio 360™ is the system I built to close that gap.
Three hundred and sixty points scored across nine areas of the business — the same areas a buyer’s playbook scores you on, except you see the score first. You see where the buyer will press. You see which numbers will hold up under diligence and which ones will get rewritten. You see the operational gaps that turn into purchase price reductions and the documentation gaps that turn into earn-out clauses you don’t want to sign.
You fix what’s fixable. You document what’s defensible. You build the case the buyer will try to tear down — before they ever see it.
That’s a playbook. That’s preparation matching preparation. That’s the asymmetry closed.
This page is for $10M to $250M business owners thinking about an exit in the next twelve to thirty-six months. It’s also for the advisors and intermediaries who serve them and want a scoring framework that surfaces what the deal sheet hides. If you’re earlier than that — five years out, ten years out, just starting to think about it — the conversation is still worth having. The owners who score the highest at exit are the ones who started preparing the longest before it.
The first conversation is direct. No pitch. No pressure. You tell me where the business sits. I tell you what I see. If Exit Ratio 360™ fits, we talk about next steps. If it doesn’t, you walk away with a clearer read on where you stand than you had before the call.
Why I Do This Work
Sunrise on Bora Bora
I was watching the sunrise on Bora Bora when an owner called me about an offer sheet that had landed the night before.
Twenty-two years building the business. Three weeks of conversations with the buyer. One offer sheet. The number was lower than what he’d been told the business was worth. The earn-out language pushed half the value into a three-year window the owner couldn’t control. The non-compete reached further than he expected. The closing date was already on the calendar.
He wasn’t calling because he wanted advice on the offer.
He was calling because he wanted to know how he got here.
That call wasn’t unusual. I’ve taken some version of it for years — owners who built something real, walked into the exit conversation in good faith, and discovered too late that good faith isn’t a strategy when the other side has a system. The owner on the phone that morning was smart. He’d hired professionals. He’d done what most owners do when they decide it’s time. And the gap between what he’d built and what he was about to walk away with was wide enough to change his retirement.
Exit Ratio 360™ came out of that pattern. Not one call — hundreds of them. The same gap. The same surprise. The same regret showing up at the same moment in the deal cycle.
I built the framework so the call before the offer sheet would be the one that mattered. So the score happens first, the preparation happens second, and the offer sheet shows up third — when there’s still leverage to use it.
That’s the work.
The Three Failure Modes
Most owners walking into an exit without a playbook fall into one of three traps. They overlap. Sometimes all three show up in the same deal.
Failure mode one — They negotiate price without preparing the business.
The owner spends six months sharpening the asking price. The buyer spends six months sharpening the deductions. By the time the diligence team finishes pulling threads — customer concentration, key-person risk, deferred maintenance, undocumented processes, working capital adjustments — the asking price has moved twenty to forty percent. The owner thought the negotiation was about the number. The buyer knew the negotiation was about the work behind the number. Only one side prepared for the conversation that actually happens.
Failure mode two — They confuse running the business with selling the business.
The skill that built the company is not the skill that sells it. Operational excellence is invisible to a buyer until it’s documented, transferable, and independent of the owner. Owner-dependent businesses get discounted. Owner-dependent businesses get earn-out clauses. Owner-dependent businesses get three-year handcuffs that turn the sale into a job. The owners who avoid that outcome started separating themselves from the business years before the deal sheet showed up.
Failure mode three — They wait for the buyer to define the timeline.
The buyer’s playbook includes a clock. Once an offer is on the table, every day that passes favors the side with more deals running in parallel. The owner with one deal in motion negotiates against an opponent who has six. The leverage to walk away — the leverage that closes the asymmetry — only exists when the owner started the timeline themselves, not when the buyer started it for them.
Each of these failure modes is fixable. Each one gets harder to fix the closer you are to the offer sheet.
What Working With You Looks Like
Step One — Call or text 808-364-9906.
The first conversation is direct. You tell me where the business sits. I tell you what I see. No pitch. No pressure. If Exit Ratio 360™ fits, we talk about what’s next. If it doesn’t, you leave the call with a clearer read on your situation than you walked in with.
Step Two — Exit Ratio 360™ Assessment.
The assessment scores the business across 360 points spanning nine evaluation areas. The output is a scored map of where the business stands today, where the buyer’s playbook will press, and where the work needs to happen before any deal sheet shows up.
Step Three — Engagement.
If the score reveals work worth doing — and the timing fits — we move into a structured engagement. Specific gaps. Specific fixes. Specific documentation. The goal is not to make the business perfect. The goal is to make the business defensible against the playbook the buyer will bring.
The owner who completes the work walks into the exit conversation with a playbook of their own. That’s the entire point.
Who This Is For — and Who It Isn’t
This page is for you if:
You own a business doing $10M to $250M in revenue. You’re thinking about an exit in the next twelve to thirty-six months — or you’re earlier than that and you’ve decided to prepare instead of react. You’ve built something real, you’ve spent decades doing it, and you don’t want to discover the asymmetry the same week you discover the offer sheet.
It’s also for advisors and intermediaries who serve owners in that band and want a scoring framework that surfaces what the deal sheet hides.
This page is not for you if:
You’re under $10M in revenue — the framework is built for businesses with the operational complexity that comes with scale. You’re already in active diligence with a signed LOI — by then the leverage Exit Ratio 360™ creates is mostly spent. You’re looking for a broker, an investment banker, or a buyer’s representative — Exit Ratio 360™ is preparation work, not deal execution.
If you’re not sure which side of the line you sit on, the call sorts that out fast.
The Exit Ratio 360™ Framework
Exit Ratio 360™ is a 360-point scoring system built for $10M to $250M businesses preparing for an exit. The points are distributed across nine evaluation areas covering the operational, financial, structural, and human elements a buyer’s playbook will examine.
The companion book is published under ISBN 979-8-9911756-9-2.
The point of the system is not the score. The point is what the score reveals — the specific places where preparation closes the gap between what the business is worth and what the owner walks away with.
Background
I’m Scott Sylvan Bell. I created Exit Ratio 360™ and authored the book that documents the framework.
I’ve published multiple solo books on business strategy, sales, discovery, and exits, with more in production. I’ve recorded more than 250 podcast episodes across two shows covering sales training and business growth and exits. I’ve produced more than 4,000 videos across multiple YouTube channels.
I serve as Director of Program Training at The Abraham Group alongside Jay Abraham, and I coach in Roland Frasier’s EPIC Network. The frameworks I bring to client work draw from both sources, but the scoring system is mine.
Based in Sacramento, California. Frequent travel to Hawaii, the South Pacific, and wherever the next conversation is.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Exit Ratio 360™ actually score?
Three hundred and sixty points across nine evaluation areas covering operational, financial, structural, customer, team, documentation, growth, risk, and transition factors. The score reveals where a buyer’s playbook will press and where preparation closes the gap.
Who is Exit Ratio 360™ built for?
Owners of $10M to $250M businesses preparing for an exit in the next twelve to thirty-six months, and the advisors who serve them. The framework assumes operational complexity that smaller businesses typically don’t carry.
How long before an exit should I start the work?
The work that closes the asymmetry happens twelve to thirty-six months before the deal sheet shows up. Earlier is better. Owners five and ten years out who start preparing now score the highest when the time comes.
Is this the same as hiring a broker or investment banker?
No. Brokers and bankers run the deal. Exit Ratio 360™ prepares the business before the deal exists. The two functions complement each other — preparation work makes the broker’s job easier and the resulting deal cleaner.
What’s the difference between Exit Ratio 360™ and a business valuation?
A valuation tells you what the business is worth today. Exit Ratio 360™ tells you where the business will lose value during a buyer’s diligence and what to fix before that happens.
Do you work with PE firms directly?
This page is built for the sell side. The framework is designed to give owners and their advisors the same level of preparation a buy-side team brings to the table.
What happens on the first call?
You tell me where the business sits. I tell you what I see. If Exit Ratio 360™ fits, we talk about next steps. If it doesn’t, you leave with a clearer read on your situation than you had going in.
Where are you based?
Sacramento, California. I travel frequently — Hawaii, the South Pacific, and wherever client work takes me. The image at the top of this page is sunrise on Bora Bora.
What is a typical investment for a service like this?
Investment depends on the scope of work, the gaps the assessment reveals, and the timeline the owner is working against. Engagements at this level typically run as a structured fee tied to the depth of the assessment and the work that follows. The first conversation is the place to discuss specifics.
How do I get started?
Call or text 808-364-9906.
You’ve Read the Page. The Asymmetry Is Real. The Playbook Is Built.
The next move is yours.
Call or Text 808-364-9906
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One conversation. Direct. No pitch.