17% of owners got an offer. Most weren't ready.

Plenty of owners sell after someone shows up with an offer they weren't expecting. The deal usually goes one way. The owner wasn't planning to sell, so the books aren't clean. There's one buyer at the table, and the buyer knows it. The owner ends up negotiating from the back foot, and the buyer gets a discount for it.

This is not a rare event. Value Builder Analytics tracks exit readiness through The Value Builder Score Report, and in the Q3 2026 Exit Readiness Index, 17% of owners said they had received a written offer for their business. That's roughly one in six.

There's a better way to do this, and it starts years before anyone calls. Decide who your natural acquirer is. Then run your decisions through one question: does this make the business more or less attractive to that buyer?

Janessa White did exactly that. She co-founded Simply Eloped in 2016, a marketplace that paired couples who wanted a small wedding with the vendors who could pull one off. Early on she decided The Knot Worldwide was the obvious home for the business, so she asked their corporate development team for a quarterly check-in and kept it up for four years. When she finally told them she was ready to sell, the LOI showed up within a week.

Dori Yona's story went the other way. He raised $14 million to build Earny, an app that clawed back refunds for consumers when prices dropped. He thought he was building a software company. When the model stalled, he started selling the one thing Earny had plenty of, which was purchase data on 3.5 million users. A consumer-packaged goods giant bought the data. They barely cared about the app.

Dori had been hoping for a life-changing exit. What he got, in his words, was a "car-changing" one. Had he known who his buyer was two years earlier, it's probably a different story.

One thing you can do this week

Write down every company that could plausibly want to buy yours. Competitors, suppliers, customers, companies in the categories next to yours. Don't edit the list yet.

Then use the 5-20 rule to cut it down. Acquirers tend to be five to twenty times the size of the companies they buy. If you're a $3 million business, a $4 million competitor can't afford you and a $500 million corporation won't bother. Your sweet spot is a buyer doing somewhere between $15 million and $60 million. It's a rule of thumb, not a law, but it'll take a long list down to a handful of names fast.

Now go through those names and ask what each one would actually be buying. Sometimes it's your revenue. Often it's something you've built up as a by-product of running the business: a customer list, a data set, a location, a team, a brand in a niche they want into. Dori's buyer didn't want his app. Had he known that earlier, he'd have spent his money differently.

Curious how a buyer would see your business today? Find out in 13 minutes - CLICK HERE

Then do what Janessa did

Once you know who's likely to buy and what they'd be buying, reach out. Introduce yourself and offer a short update every quarter. You're not pitching a sale. You're making sure that when you're ready, they already know your name.