An exit plan is not a document you write the month before you sell. It is the order in which you fix the things a buyer will price, starting long enough before the sale for the fixes to count. The Harvest Method teaches it in three seasons: Sow, Grow and Exit. This guide walks through each one.
Before anything: your number
Work out what you need from the sale, after tax and fees, and the date you want to stop. Then put a number on the business today, the way a buyer would, with the valuation calculator. The gap between the two is your exit plan's job.
Season one: Sow, make it clean
A buyer's first question is whether they can trust what they are told.
- Financials a buyer believes: monthly management accounts, normalised profit and an add-back register with evidence for every line.
- Take yourself out: list what would break if you disappeared for six weeks, and fix each item with a name and a date.
- Legal tidy-up: contracts in the company's name, intellectual property owned by the company, a clean share register, and the property position settled.
- Tax: check now that you qualify for Business Asset Disposal Relief, because the conditions run for two years.
Season two: Grow, make it valuable
A buyer pays a multiple of profit, and the multiple reflects risk. This season moves the multiple.
- The levers: recurring revenue, customer spread, margin trend and a defensible niche. Our guide to EBITDA multiples explains each.
- Systems: the business runs on documented processes, not on your memory.
- The growth story: a credible three-year plan backed by pipeline, pricing and expansion routes.
- Concentration and risk: write the risk register a buyer would write about you, and work through it.
Season three: Exit, make it sold
- Know your buyers: trade, private equity, management, employees or an individual, and what each is likely to pay. See how to sell your business.
- Build the data room early, using the due diligence checklist. Readiness is negotiating power.
- Know the structures and their traps: share or asset sale, deferred payments, earn-outs and warranties. Decide your red lines before you are under pressure.
- Run the process with advisers who have done deals your size.
How long it takes
Allow at least six to twelve months of deliberate preparation before going to market, and more if the business still depends heavily on you. The work in season one is the slowest, so start there.
Get the plan written
Take the free Harvest Score to see which season needs you most. The Harvest Intensive takes you through all twelve modules of the method on your own business, in two days in the room and a live online session two weeks later, with a Reconnect at six weeks, and you leave with the plan written.
General information to help you prepare, not tax, legal or financial advice. Rates and rules change; check the current position and take advice on your own circumstances.
