A Letter to Business Owners Thinking About an Exit

The market for selling a business has never been more promising — and the stakes have never been higher.

Across the lower middle market, acquisition demand has surged. An expanding set of buyers is competing aggressively for businesses between $5M and $100M in revenue.

For owners who know how to create leverage through a disciplined, well-run process, the results can be extraordinary.

Over the last two years, we’ve worked with owners who achieved outcomes they never would have expected.

• One owner dreamed of a $10M exit and sold for $13.5M.
• Another thought $70M was the ceiling, and closed at $90M.
• And one military veteran didn’t just want a buyer — he wanted the right steward. Someone who would protect the culture, legacy, employees, and surrounding community he had built. He ended up finding another veteran to acquire the business — 20 years younger, and living just 10 miles down the road.

These outcomes aren’t reserved for the lucky few. They’re what happens when owners run a deliberate process with the right preparation, representation, and leverage.

In reality, many owners in today’s market experience the opposite: lowball offers, inadequate advice, and transactions that fall apart before they reach the finish line.

Axial for Owners exists to change that: to make great exits not just possible, but probable, for every owner who participates in the program.

About Axial for Owners

Axial for Owners exists for one reason: to help American business owners maximize the likelihood of a successful exit.

We do this by helping owners navigate the most important financial decision of their lives with clarity, confidence, and the right support.

Most owners sell a business once. And, left alone, they’re forced to manage the exit process with imperfect information and a fragmented ecosystem of referrals, content, and opinions. The consequences of choosing the wrong path and/or the wrong advisors are costly and compound for years.

Axial for Owners is our response to that reality. 

Exit Ready helps owners understand what their business is worth today, what buyer demand looks like, and what real preparation requires before entering a process.

Advisor Finder helps exit-ready owners hire exceptional M&A advisors — often unlocking materially higher valuations and a stronger buyer pool through a competitive process.

Last year, we helped thousands of business owners become Exit Ready, and hundreds evaluate whether hiring an M&A advisor was the right route for them. 

The number one priority for owners who participate in Axial for Owners: no regrets. 

Several years down the line, when owners reflect on their transaction, we help ensure they have the peace of mind that they approached it the right way — deliberately, thoughtfully, and with closure that they took the time to do it right.

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While promising, the forces reshaping the M&A market today are not making exits any easier:

Reason 1: The buyer universe has exploded

Larger private equity firms are increasingly coming downmarket. Family offices are doing more direct investments than ever. Search funds have matured into a credible buyer class. Independent sponsors are growing quickly. And strategic buyers are increasingly relying on acquisitions as organic growth becomes more difficult.

This should be good news — and it is — but only if navigated correctly. Buyer quality varies widely. And a large buyer universe only creates leverage when it’s well understood.

Reason 2: Owners are being contacted more than ever

Buyer outreach tools are powerful. Data and automation tools now make it easy for buyers to find owners and start conversations quickly.

We’re seeing more owners fall into the trap of entertaining one-off discussions — reacting instead of playing offense — and quietly losing control before they realize it. Early momentum can feel like progress, even when it’s eroding leverage.

Reason 3: Technology has raised the bar for execution

The best M&A advisors today use modern data, AI, and process automation to identify broader and more relevant buyer sets, pressure-test demand, and run tight, competitive processes.

Advisors lagging behind the technology curve aren’t just slightly less effective. They are putting their clients at a severe disadvantage, often measured in millions of dollars.

Reason 4: Savvy marketers have entered the advisory market

Marketing experts and tech entrepreneurs have realized how lucrative lower middle market M&A advisory can be — and many are reaching owners earlier than ever, often before they’ve spoken to anyone they truly trust.

But strong lead generation is not the same as deal execution. Owners who hire advisors without deep process experience often discover the gap too late, when the cost can be measured in millions.

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The real problem isn’t a lack of advisors, buyers, tools, or information.

It’s that owners are often left without trusted guidance when making irreversible decisions — in a market with no clear standard for what “good” looks like and little margin for error if they get it wrong.

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Within Axial for Owners, we focus on four things:

Education: Helping exit-curious owners understand how M&A actually works — how deals are structured, where value is created or lost, and what great representation really looks like.

Preparation: Helping owners make sure they are personally and professionally ready well before a process begins, not halfway through diligence.

Timing: Helping owners understand whether the timing is right based on the valuation they could command, the current buyer demand for businesses like theirs, and their levels of business & personal exit readiness.

Advisor Selection: Helping exit-ready owners find the best M&A advisor possible — one with the relevant experience, credibility, and judgment to represent them well — on the belief that every owner deserves the best.

2025

In 2025, through our content and media arm Exit Ready, we invested heavily in giving owners practical, unbiased tools and insights to plan ahead, including:

• The Exit Ready Valuation Calculator
• The Buyer Demand Report
• The Market Trends Dashboard
• The 2025 M&A Advisor Fee Guide
• The Exit Planning Resource Center
• A host of free articles & Ebooks on exit planning and advisor selection

And through Advisor Finder, we helped 2x the number of owners hire advisors in 2025 relative to 2024.

These were owners across a wide range of industries, representing businesses from $5M to $50M+ in revenue and a variety of transaction goals — from pursuing a sale to exploring growth capital.

For example:

• An owner in Industrials ($55M revenue, $6.9M profit) pursuing a sale
• An owner in Technology ($8.5M revenue, $1.9M profit) pursuing a sale
• An owner in Business Services ($21M revenue, $4M profit) looking to raise capital
• An owner in Healthcare ($9.5M revenue, $1.5M profit) pursuing a sale

Along the way, we saw owners pause one-off buyer conversations and avoid costly representation mistakes.

2026

2026 is the year of deepening our resources for better owner decision-making.

We’re focused on building an online experience that helps owners decide when to act, how to prepare, and which paths actually make sense for their unique situation.

We’re strengthening our toolkit to help owners create and execute great exit plans.

We’re going to share more real success stories and failure stories so owners can benefit from other owners’ trials and tribulations.

And finally, we’re investing in the speed and relevance of advisor matching. We’ll make matches more thoughtful and multidimensional, while delivering them faster with the help of modern technology.

A Call to Owners

If you’re a business owner thinking about your future, here’s the standard worth holding yourself to:

Treat the decision to sell your business and/or hire your M&A advisor with the same rigor you would use to hire your most important executive. Seek multiple perspectives. Ask uncomfortable questions. Be patient enough to get it right.

The sale of your business consolidates years—sometimes decades—of work into a single outcome. It deserves deliberate planning, expert representation, and clear-eyed judgment.

A Final Note…

Years from now, most owners won’t measure the success of their exit solely by price.

They’ll measure it by whether they felt informed rather than rushed; supported rather than alone; and confident rather than uncertain.

Our hope is that more owners reach that moment knowing they took the time to do this right — for their business, their families, their employees, and whatever comes next for them personally.

And if you’re beginning to think about that moment now, sometimes the most valuable first step isn’t a decision at all.

It’s a conversation.

Nick Coetzee
Head of Axial for Owners

Drop me a line, anytime, at nick.coetzee@axial.net