Sell, sell part, raise, fix one thing first, or wait.
The decision is yours. Our job is to make the trade-offs visible. Professional acquirers evaluate ownership alternatives constantly; most founders make this decision once, so the comparison deserves the same rigour – and an adviser whose answer is allowed to be not yet. Any adviser paid at closing has an incentive to turn “considering” into “selling”. Read this page with that in mind, including about us.
One focused working session that commits you to nothing. Not comparing the paths is itself a decision, made by default.
The choice set is bigger than sell-or-don’t
Five options are usually live, and they belong side by side – including doing nothing. ∗ “Sell part” is the option that hides the most: it runs from taking minority liquidity while keeping control, through a majority recapitalisation, to selling control and rolling equity alongside a fund – and the economics and the governance are very different in each. What each one does to your proceeds and your authority →
Sell now
- What it gives you
- Certainty, a date, and the current market. Removes concentration risk from your balance sheet in one step.
- What it costs
- Whatever the next two years would have added, and any weakness a buyer finds that you have not had time to fix.
- What it forecloses
- Optionality. Once a process is live and visible, stopping it is expensive.
- When it is right
- The business is at a defensible high, or the reason to sell is not about price at all.
Sell part
- What it gives you
- Liquidity now, upside later. De-risks the household without ending the company chapter.
- What it costs
- You acquire a partner with governance rights, a clock, and a view.
- What it forecloses
- Unilateral control of the second exit, including its timing.
- When it is right
- You believe in the next chapter but cannot afford to have everything riding on it.
Fix one thing first
- What it gives you
- The specific thing a buyer will discount you for, removed before they see it. A focused fix can have an unusually high return on the months invested.
- What it costs
- Time, and management attention that is not going into growth. Market conditions may not wait.
- What it forecloses
- Nothing, if the fix is real. Everything, if it becomes a reason never to start.
- When it is right
- One identifiable issue – concentration, a contract, a founder dependency – is doing most of the damage.
Wait
- What it gives you
- Compounding, and the strongest negotiating stance there is: not needing to transact.
- What it costs
- Continued concentration risk, and a market that may be worse later. Waiting is a position, not the absence of one.
- What it forecloses
- Nothing structurally – but a decision deferred repeatedly tends to become a decision made under pressure.
- When it is right
- Nothing external is forcing the question and the business is still improving faster than the market is repricing it.
Raise instead
- What it gives you
- Growth capital and a partner without selling the company. Keeps the exit for a larger business, later.
- What it costs
- Dilution, a preference stack that sits ahead of you at the eventual sale, and a board with a fund’s clock.
- What it forecloses
- The clean, founder-timed sale. Once institutional money is in, the timing is no longer yours alone.
- When it is right
- The market is rewarding growth over profit in your category, and you would rather own a smaller piece of something worth several times more.
∗ Decision aids that name the decision, lay out every option including doing nothing, and help the person weigh what matters to them improve knowledge and reduce the feeling of being uninformed – 209 randomised trials, 107,698 participants, high-certainty evidence (Cochrane, 2024). That literature is medical; we apply the structure, not its effect sizes. What we cannot yet give you is an outcome range for each option drawn from our own completed sales. When the sample supports it, that publishes here.
The three lenses
Every path should be quantified through three lenses on the same company: what the financial market will pay, what specific strategic buyers could justify, and what you actually need.
The three lenses answer different questions.
Three independent readings of the same company – deliberately kept apart.
- The number, after structure
- Your role – stay, transition, out
- Timing that fits your life
- What happens to the team
- The legacy answer
- Risk you can live with
A good transaction works across all three.
Illustrative. The lenses are deliberately not drawn on one scale – collapsing them into one number is the mistake the framework exists to prevent.
When the three lenses point the same way, the decision is easy. When they diverge – the market pays less than strategics could justify; either one pays more than you need; nothing yet pays what the future might – that is where judgment earns its keep.
When the people who have to sign don’t agree
A co-founder who wants to keep building. A board with its own timeline. Investors whose economics diverge from yours. This is a common reason a good decision stalls – and the three lenses exist for exactly this: they give the disagreement a structure, and structure is often what a stuck ownership conversation is missing. Bring them. We would rather run the first session with everyone who has a vote in the room than reconcile positions afterwards.
Two things worth saying plainly
Keeping the company is also a choice. You buy it back from the market every year, at whatever it is then worth. Some companies are compounding machines and should not be sold; others are compounding risks whose owners have stopped noticing. And when most of your wealth is one company, sometimes the most valuable transaction is the one that makes your next decision unhurried.
If raising is the right answer, we will say so – and say plainly whether it is work we would take or work you should place elsewhere. A recommendation is worth more when it is allowed to point away from the mandate in front of us.
What tells us to say “not yet”
One of us waited on an earn-out that paid on a definition, not on performance. One of us watched a buyer walk in week ten over a contract nobody had read since year two. Those are not stories we tell to sell a process; they are the reasons we sometimes tell a founder to fix one thing first, or to wait. Our fee is earned at closing, so we earn more if you sell than if you don’t – we say that out loud, because pretending otherwise would be absurd, and because it is what makes “not yet” cost us something to say.
Compare the paths with an adviser willing to put “not yet” on the table.
And transparent about how we are paid if you do sell. There is no deadline on this conversation, only on getting the fundamentals right. And if anything lands on your desk before we next speak – a letter, an approach, a term sheet – call us first. That call is free.