Most owners don’t plan the sale of their companies. Instead, they drift into it after receiving a “we’re interested” email. The Owner’s Manual helps prepare founders and owners for a potential sale years before that email is received. This book explains how private equity investors evaluate and price businesses so that if and when you are ready to sell your business, you can be well-positioned to get the outcome you want.

Drawing on hundreds of executed transactions and candid interviews with founders, bankers, and private equity investors, Samson Partners Group founder Seth Deutsch lays out why to sell (or not), when to sell, and how to prepare your business for a sale that maximizes value without derailing the company you’ve built.
Inside, you’ll learn to:

​

• Think like a buyer: prioritize predictable cash flow, decrease key man risk, build durable revenue, reduce customer concentration, and focus on the metrics that move multiples.

• Baseline with the Exit Value Realization System™: every business (based on its industry, size and other factors) trades in a range of multiples. Where your business is in that range depends on seven elements. You’ll see where you are in that range TODAY and then you have a choice: remodel the business before selling or take it to market as is. But either way, you’ll know where you stand.

• Choose the right path: platform vs. add-on, when to go to market, and how to assemble a team that can help you from the time you contemplate selling all the way through to the exit.

• Understand that valuation is not the only consideration in selling a business: who you partner with matters, and how the deal is structured will be a function of how anti-fragile the business is.

• Avoid the traps: missed numbers, “market” myths, being unprepared, and other key factors that kill deals.