The best exits are built 2 to 3 years before the sale. Six moves matter most: get your financials clean and consistent, make the business run without you, fix customer concentration, grow recurring revenue, write down how the work gets done, and know your own number before anyone offers you one.
Most owners start thinking seriously about selling about eighteen months too late. Not because the business isn't ready, but because the version of the business a buyer pays top dollar for takes a couple of years to put on paper. Here is the checklist we wish every owner had, whether they end up selling to us or to anyone else.
1. Make your books boring
Buyers pay for certainty. Separate personal expenses from the company, close your months on time, and keep job-level costing that ties to the P&L. If your accountant only hears from you in April, upgrade that relationship now. Clean books don't just survive diligence; they shorten it by months and remove the discount buyers apply to mystery.
2. Fire yourself from daily operations
The hardest question in any first call: "What happens when you take three weeks off?" If the answer is chaos, the business is a job, not an asset. Promote a second-in-command, hand off estimating, and let the team make mistakes while you're still there to catch them. Every responsibility you shed adds real dollars to the price.
3. Fix concentration before it's a discount
One customer over 25 percent of revenue makes buyers nervous, including us. Use the runway you have to broaden the base: new property managers, new neighborhoods, a second service line. You don't need to replace the big customer. You need to make them optional.
4. Turn one-time work into memberships
Recurring maintenance agreements are the single most valuable revenue you can build, because they arrive next year without being resold. Even a few hundred active memberships change how a buyer models the future, and they flatten your seasonality while you still own the place.
5. Write down how the work gets done
If the playbook lives in your head and your lead tech's, the buyer is purchasing two resignations away from trouble. Simple SOPs, a real onboarding path, and posted wage ranges make the machine legible, and they make your people more likely to stay through a transition, which protects the deal itself.
6. Know your number, and your after
Two questions, answered honestly, before any buyer calls: what do you need the sale to produce, after taxes and debt? And what does Tuesday morning look like a year later? Owners who can answer both negotiate from calm. Owners who can't get talked into deals that fit someone else's life.
Start the checklist now and the call you take in 2028 will be a very different conversation. And if you want a buyer's honest read on where you stand today, we'll give you one, no strings attached.