Practical answers for owners who want clarity before timing, burnout, or an unsolicited offer forces a decision.
Ideally one to five years before you intend to exit. The strongest exits are engineered before timing forces your hand. Preparation improves financial clarity, leadership depth, transferability, and leverage.
A Stewardship Exit is a transition designed to preserve the owner’s legacy while protecting employees, customers, community relationships, and enterprise value after closing.
Buyers pay for transferable earnings. If revenue, approvals, customer relationships, and problem-solving depend on the owner, buyers see risk — and risk compresses multiples.
A confidential working session where SDG scores your readiness, identifies the gap between current and potential value, and maps whether you are ready to sell now or should spend 12–24 months preparing.
A buyer’s-eye and lender’s-eye stress test of whether the business is fundable, transferable, and realistically priced before it is taken to market.
Many businesses go to market before they are fundable at the asking price. Customer concentration, inflated add-backs, owner dependence, weak reporting, and unrealistic expectations often kill deals in underwriting.
Beyond price, buyers evaluate emotional stability, leadership depth, financial clarity, process discipline, owner readiness, customer concentration, and whether the seller will support continuity after closing.
Reduce risk. Clean up financials, diversify customers, install leadership depth, document key processes, create scorecards, delegate decision rights, and make the business less dependent on you.
A typical broker starts with marketing. SDG starts with underwriting: debt coverage, risk mitigation, transferability, add-back defensibility, and buyer fit. The goal is not just attention; it is a deal that can close.
SDG wears two hats: investor and advisor. Because SDG actively evaluates and buys businesses, it brings a buyer’s-eye view to preparing owners for third-party sales or stewardship-oriented transitions.
The current content points to owner-led businesses around $1M–$20M in revenue, especially owners who care who buys the company and want a thoughtful transition.
Waiting until they are burned out or pressured. By then, leverage is often gone. The best time to prepare is before you have to sell.
A confidential Strategy Session will help score readiness, identify value gaps, and map the next steps.
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