Here’s a number that stops most founders cold: only one in every hundred companies on Earth ever reaches ten million dollars in revenue. Not profit. Revenue.
If that made you wince a little, here’s the one you really need to hear. Of the founders who actually try to exit, the ones who hire a banker, list the business for sale, start a real process, only twenty percent of those ever close a deal.
Twenty percent.
And of that small group who do exit, less than five percent truly maximize value. Most leave life-changing money on the table.
This isn’t meant to be discouraging. It’s worth sharing because almost every founder starts out believing something different.
“My business is valuable, and could sell for a multiple of revenue.”
“I’ll deal with exit readiness later, once things slow down.”
“If a buyer ever came knocking, I’d be ready.”
“I just need to get through this quarter, then I’ll focus on the bigger picture.”
That thinking is exactly how most founders end up stuck. Heads down, grinding, with a business that’s technically valuable on paper but not actually sellable, fundable, or able to run without them.
The Good News: This Is a Solvable Problem
It’s worth remembering that some of the biggest exits in history didn’t happen because the numbers were extraordinary. Microsoft paid over a billion dollars for Yammer at forty times revenue. Yahoo paid over a billion for Tumblr at eighty five times revenue. Facebook paid nineteen billion dollars for WhatsApp when it had barely any revenue or employees at all.
Those deals happened because something other than the spreadsheet made the business worth that price, and those off the charts multiples. That something other is learnable. It’s not luck, and it’s not reserved for Silicon Valley outliers.
Where Most Founders Actually Are
Think of building a company like climbing a mountain. At the summit are your goals: the wealth, the freedom, the experiences, the impact you’re actually building this for. Most founders can describe that summit in detail.
What almost nobody can do with the same clarity is answer a much simpler question. Where exactly am I on the mountain right now?
Not where you hope to be. Not where you’re working toward. Where you actually stand today, if someone looked at your business with a microscope.
That gap, between an exciting goal and a fuzzy sense of current reality, is where most exit potential quietly disappears.
Establish Your Baseline
Before you can close the gap between where you are and where you’re going, you have to get honest about the starting point. No judgment, no aspiration, just clarity.
Three things worth working through this week, in this order:
- Exit Readiness Score. A real read on what you actually have in place today, not what you’re building toward.
- Football Field Valuation. A fast, traditional look at what your business would be worth today using standard revenue and profit multiples, the way a market would look at it cold.
- The Great Outcome. A clear picture of what life looks like three years from now if everything goes right, including whether and how an exit fits into that picture.
Set aside two focused blocks this week, thirty to sixty minutes each, and put them on your calendar now rather than leaving it for whenever there’s time. Garbage in, garbage out applies here more than almost anywhere else. Rush the exercises and you won’t have an honest baseline to build from.
These three exercises are just the starting point. Getting truly exit-ready, in a way that actually holds up when a buyer, an investor, or your own future self comes looking, takes the full picture: what drives value, what scares buyers off, what running without you really requires.
Want the complete picture, not just the starting point? See how ExitDNA walks you through it →
— Mac
