The head start nobody explained to me

I remember thinking how nice it would be to sell my business.

I also remember not having the first clue where to start.

Somewhere in the back of my mind was something an attorney had said to me once, on a matter that had nothing to do with selling anything. He mentioned, almost in passing, that if I ever wanted to sell, I ought to start a year or two before I actually started the process of selling.

I nodded. I filed it away. I had no idea what he meant.

He was right. And if anything, he undersold it.

What the runway is actually for

The reason you need a year or two isn't that there's a year or two of paperwork. It's that most of what a buyer looks at can't be manufactured on a deadline.

Your books are the obvious one. If your financials have been kept for tax purposes rather than for showing anybody, cleaning them up is not a weekend project — and a set of statements that got tidy three months before you went to market tells its own story.

But the books are only where it starts. A buyer wants to see that the business has been running well, and running well is a measurement over time. One good year after two uneven ones is not the same as three steady ones. There's no way to compress that.

Then there's your team. Who actually runs the place when you're not there? If the honest answer is that nothing important happens without you, that's not a fact you can change in ninety days. That's a couple of years of deliberately handing things off and letting other people carry them.

And your customer profile. If one account is a large share of your revenue, or if half your work comes through a relationship that lives in your phone and nobody else's, a buyer sees risk. Diversifying takes as long as it takes to go win the work.

None of that is a checklist you run at the end. It's a way of operating that you either started early enough or you didn't.

The Texas piece I hadn't thought about

Here's one that catches Texas trade owners specifically: in most of our trades, the credential that lets the company do the work belongs to a person, not to the company.

A Texas plumbing company operates under a designated Responsible Master Plumber, and that RMP can only hold that designation for one company at a time. A Texas HVAC company operates under a licensed air conditioning and refrigeration contractor — again, an individual license, tied to a named human being.

If that person is you, and the whole point of the transaction is that you leave, somebody has to answer the question of who holds the license the day after closing. If that person is a long-tenured employee, the buyer is going to want to know how likely that employee is to stay.

That is not a closing-week problem. That is a problem you want to have already solved.

The other half nobody mentioned

Everything above is about getting your house in order. But there was a second set of questions rattling around in my head that had nothing to do with my own operations, and I couldn't answer any of them either.

What multiple could I actually expect? What does the process even look like — how long, how many buyers, how much of my time? What happens when my team finds out? Can I do this without my team finding out?

Those aren't preparation questions. They're orientation questions. And you can do every bit of the cleanup work above and still walk into the process with no sense of what's about to happen to you.

Why I couldn't get answers

The trouble was that I wasn't in the mergers and acquisitions space. I was in the business of owning and operating a company, which is a different job entirely.

So I didn't have anyone to talk to. Not really. I certainly didn't have anyone on the M&A side I could call up and think out loud with.

Looking back, if I had known an advisor, or even just another owner who had already been through it, I could have filled hours of lunches and dinners getting my questions answered. Not paid engagements. Just conversations. The kind where you find out which of your worries are the real ones.

That's the part I'd tell an owner today. The two-year head start isn't only about your financials and your org chart. It's also about giving yourself enough time to figure out what you don't know yet — while you still have time to do something about it.

If selling is somewhere on your horizon, even a couple of years out, the first conversation is free — and it isn't a sales call.