At what point on our exit runway should we hire an investment banker, transaction attorney, and wealth advisor, and how do we prevent deal preparation from derailing day-to-day leadership team execution?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Building an external deal advisory team must happen in structured stages across your multi-year exit runway. Hiring transaction professionals too late leads to poor deal structures and rushed diligence, while hiring them too early creates unnecessary friction and exorbitant retainer costs.

Thirty-six months out, hire a fiduciary personal wealth advisor who specializes in post-transaction estate and tax planning. Your wealth advisor must calculate your exact wealth gap, identifying the net after-tax proceeds required to fund your life post-exit. If the business cannot command that net number today, you know exactly how much enterprise value you must build through operational execution.

Twenty-four months out, retain an M&A-specialized corporate attorney and your CPA firm to audit your corporate records, clean up operating agreements, review customer contracts for assignability, and prepare historical financial audits.

Twelve to eighteen months out, interview and select an investment banker or M&A advisor. Their job is to benchmark your metrics against peer transactions, craft your confidential information memorandum, and run a competitive auction process.

To prevent deal preparation from breaking your business, do not allow your entire leadership team to become consumed by diligence. Appoint a single transaction point person, typically your Integrator or financial controller, supported by external paralegals and junior staff to manage the data room. Protect your departmental leaders from the transaction noise. Keep your weekly Level 10 Meeting cadences sacred and continue executing quarterly Rocks focused purely on baseline operational performance. If your core business performance dips while you are preparing the pitch deck, buyers will use that operational deceleration to re-trade your valuation.