The 12-Month Exit Sprint: What to Fix Before You Ever Talk to a Buyer

You don’t “get ready” for an exit once a buyer shows up.

By that point, the story is already written.

Your margins are what they are.
Your contracts are what they are.
Your leadership team is either credible… or it’s you holding everything together with WhatsApp and caffeine.

An exit isn’t a finish line. It’s a 12-month audit of every decision you’ve already made. Buyers don’t pay for potential, they pay for proof.

This is your 12-Month Exit Sprint: otherwise known as “what to fix before you ever talk to a buyer”.

When a buyer looks at your business, they’re not buying the heroic origin story.

They’re asking three simple questions about the last 12 months:

1. Is profit growing?
2. Is revenue repeatable?
3. Can this thing run without you?

That’s the Exit Sprint Lens.

If the honest answers right now are “sort of”, “not really”, and “absolutely not”, you’ve got work to do. The good news? You don’t need 5 years to fix it. You need one very intentional year.

Think of the next 12 months as a compressed, deliberate rebuild of the version of your company that’s actually acquirable.

Let’s start where every buyer starts: margins.

Top line is vanity.
Margin is valuation.

If you’re doing £3m in revenue at 10% EBITDA, you’ve got £300k in profit. At a 5x multiple, that’s a £1.5m headline valuation.

If you clean that to 20% EBITDA without changing the top line, you’re now at £600k profit. Same 5x multiple, but now it’s a £3m valuation.

You didn’t get “better at selling”. You got better at keeping what you already earned. That’s a £1.5m value swing created by margin discipline.

Call it the Margin Gravity Model:

• Pricing: Are you charging what this actually costs to deliver?
• Product mix: Are you overloaded with bespoke, low-margin, drama-heavy work?
• Delivery discipline: Are scope creep and “little favours” silently killing you?

Over the next 12 months, your job is to:

• Kill low-margin offers and clients you’d secretly celebrate losing.
• Reprice legacy retainers that never kept up with your cost base.
• Tighten delivery so “free extra bits” become paid upgrades, not margin leaks.

🖊Red Pen Prompt: Margins
If every client on your worst pricing found out what your best clients pay… would you be comfortable explaining the difference?

Buyers don’t value “vibes”. They value contracts.

They’re asking:

• How long does this revenue stick around?
• How fast can it walk out the door?
• Can these contracts even be assigned to the buyer’s new entity?

Your job is to make your revenue look less like a pile of one-night stands and more like a healthy, long-term relationship portfolio.

Over 12 months, focus on:

1. Standardising terms
   
   • One set of T&Cs. Clear notice periods. Clear renewal mechanics.
   • No more bespoke snowflake contracts for every client that ever asked.
     
     
2. Shifting to longer terms and retainers
   
   • Turn rolling, cancellable-at-any-time work into 6–12 month commitments.
   • Bake in clear scope, clear change orders, and price review points.
     
     
3. De-risking concentration and assignability
   
   • Reduce dependency on one or two whale clients if they dominate revenue.
   • Make sure key contracts can be assigned in a sale without starting from scratch.

Build a Revenue Quality Pack: a simple schedule of your top clients with contract value, term, margin, sector, and notice period. A buyer should be able to model this in five minutes.

🖊Red Pen Prompt: Contracts
How many of your top 10 customers could walk away in under 30 days… and what would that do to your story?

One of the ugliest phrases you hear in deals is “founder risk”.

Translation: “If this person gets hit by a bus, this business is screwed.”

If all the real trust, all the sales, and all the key decisions live with you, you don’t own a company, you own a stressful, overpaid job with extra admin.

The next 12 months are about moving from hero mode to team mode.

Start with a Dependency Grid:

• Sales: Who actually closes deals?
• Clients: Who do key customers call when something matters?
• Delivery: Who signs off work?
• Finance & ops: Who knows what’s really going on under the hood?

Anywhere your name shows up as “the person” is a risk a buyer will price in.

Your sprint:

• Put credible people in visible roles: Head of Delivery, Head of Growth, Head of Ops.
• Start transferring relationships: have your second line lead QBRs, key pitches, and major updates.
• Formalise leadership rhythms: weekly leadership meetings, clear KPIs, documented decisions.

This isn’t cosmetic. Buyers aren’t stupid. They’ll know within 10 minutes of a meeting whether the team is real or just window dressing.

🖊Red Pen Prompt: Leadership
If you vanished for 4 weeks with no phone or email, what would actually break?

Most founders underestimate how brutal due diligence is.

You’ll be asked for:

• Revenue and margin by client, by product, by month.
• Churn and retention by cohort.
• Pipeline, conversion rates, win/loss reasons.
• Utilisation, salary, and cost per role.

If your current “data strategy” is three spreadsheets, a gut feeling, and a finance system nobody really understands, you’re inviting a discount.

The next 12 months are about building a single source of truth:

• One accounting platform that actually reflects reality.
• One CRM that’s being used properly, not updated before board meetings.
• One delivery/time-tracking system that proves how work gets done.

Every month, report on:

• Gross margin by client and by service line.
• New business vs. expansion vs. churn.
• Pipeline coverage vs. target.

It’s not enough to have the numbers; you need a story:

“Here’s what we saw. Here’s what we changed. Here’s how the numbers moved.”

🖊Red Pen Prompt: Data
If a buyer asked for last quarter’s margin by client, could you send it in under 30 minutes without starting a forensic investigation?

Here’s a hard truth: buyers don’t need everything to be perfect.

They just need your weaknesses to be known, contained, and priced in.

What they hate is surprises.

Common red flags:

• IP owned by freelancers or agencies you used years ago, not by you.
• “Handshake” deals with key staff or advisors that aren’t documented.
• Compliance mess: GDPR, data handling, licences, sector-specific rules.
• Single-point technical knowledge (that one dev who knows “the thing”).

You don’t need to fix everything in 12 months, but you do need a risk register:

• Here’s the issue.
• Here’s what we’ve already done about it.
• Here’s what’s left and by when.

When you own the narrative, it’s much harder for a buyer to use it as a blunt instrument to knock the price down.

🖊Red Pen Prompt: Red Flags
What’s the one issue you’re quietly hoping a buyer won’t ask about?

That’s your starting point.

To turn this into something you can actually score, use a simple Deal Friction Index.

Rate yourself 1–5 in each area:

How to Score Your Deal Friction Index (1–5 Rubric)

Don’t overthink the scoring. Read each band and circle the one that feels uncomfortably accurate.

1–2 = friction the buyer will absolutely use against you.

3 = functional, but improvable.

4–5 = the kind of business people actually enjoy buying.

Margins

1 = On fire (in a bad way)

• We don’t track gross margin by client/service.
• Pricing is random and historic.
• We regularly do work that feels busy but doesn’t really make money.

2 = Weak

• We have a rough idea of margin, but it’s not clean or consistent.
• Some clients/offers are clearly underpriced, we just haven’t fixed them.

3 = Okay but leaky

• We track margin by client or project sometimes, not always.
• We know our worst offenders and occasionally say no to bad work.
• EBITDA is positive but fragile (a couple of client losses would hurt).

4 = Strong

• We track gross margin by client and offer every month.
• We’ve removed or repriced most low-margin work.
• EBITDA trend over the last 12 months is up and to the right.

5 = Buyer-ready

• Clean monthly margin data, cut by client, offer, and channel.
• Clear story: “Here’s what we changed; here’s how margin improved.”
• EBITDA is strong and stable, with headroom for further optimisation.

Contracts (Revenue Quality)

1 = Hope and handshakes

• Key customers have no written contracts or are on very loose terms.
• Lots of “project by project” work with no commitment.

2 = Patchy

• Some contracts exist, but terms vary wildly.
• Notice periods and renewals are inconsistent or unclear.

3 = Functional but fragile

• Most clients have contracts, but many are short term/30-day.
• Little standardisation. Assignability isn’t always clear.

4 = Strong

• Standard T&Cs used for the majority of clients.
• Many clients on 6–12 month terms or rolling retainers with decent notice.
• Basic client schedule exists (value, term, renewal dates, etc.).

5 = Buyer-ready

• Fully standardised contract set with clear notice, renewal, and assignability.
• Majority of revenue on predictable, medium/long-term agreements.
• Clean, current “Revenue Quality Pack” a buyer could model from in 5 minutes.

Leadership Dependency

1 = You are the business

• You lead nearly all big sales, client relationships, and decisions.
• If you disappeared, everything would stall within weeks.

2 = One-and-a-half people

• There are a couple of capable people, but you’re still the bottleneck.
• Clients and team default to you for “real” decisions.

3 = Emerging bench

• You have a leadership group in name; some are starting to step up.
• A few key clients and projects run fine without you, others don’t.

4 = Credible team

• Clearly defined leadership roles (sales, ops, delivery, finance).
• They lead key client meetings, internal rhythms, and decision-making.
• You’re still important, but not essential to day-to-day.

5 = Buyer-ready

• The leadership team could run the company without you for 3–6 months.
• Succession plans, incentives, and responsibilities are clear.
• Buyers see a machine with a bench, not a personality cult.

Data Quality

1 = Fog

• Numbers live in random spreadsheets and people’s heads.
• We’d need weeks to pull basic due diligence info together.

2 = Messy

• There is an accounting system, a CRM, and some reports…
• …but nothing fully reconciles, and nobody fully trusts it.

3 = Adequate

• We can get reliable P&L data and some client breakdowns, with effort.
• Reporting is monthly but limited; analysis is ad hoc.

4 = Strong

• One source of truth for finance, CRM, and delivery.
• Regular reporting on revenue, margin, churn, pipeline, utilisation.
• We can answer most buyer-level questions within a day or two.

5 = Buyer-ready

• Clean, consistent, exportable data going back at least 24–36 months.
• Standard monthly packs already mirror what a buyer will ask for.
• A draft data room structure already exists; it’s mostly drag-and-drop.

Risk & Compliance

1 = Unknown unknowns

• We don’t really know where our biggest legal/compliance risks are.
• IP, contracts, and policies haven’t been reviewed in years (if ever).

2 = Known but unmanaged

• We’re vaguely aware of issues (IP, employment, data) but nothing is documented.
• No risk register, no prioritisation.

3 = Partially managed

• Some key contracts and IP assignments exist.
• We’ve handled one or two obvious risks, but there’s no systematic approach.

4 = Under control

• Risk register in place: issues, owners, timelines.
• Key IP, employment, and data/compliance gaps largely closed.
• Nothing catastrophic hiding under the surface.

5 = Buyer-ready

• Legal, IP, HR, and compliance are in good order and properly documented.
• Remaining risks are known, quantified, and already being mitigated.
• No obvious “oh sh*t” moments waiting to be discovered in diligence.

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Anything under a 3 is a friction point. Friction points become negotiation points. Negotiation points become discounts.

Your 12-month sprint is about reducing friction:

• Improving margins by a few points.
• Locking in better terms.
• Making the team genuinely credible.
• Making the numbers boringly reliable.
• Moving skeletons from “hidden” to “managed”.

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We worked with an agency that looked great on the surface: solid revenue, decent brand, happy clients.

Under the hood?

• 11% EBITDA.
• No standard contracts.
• Most key clients on 30-day, cancellable-anytime terms.
• The founder was on every major client call.

Over 14 months, they:

• Dropped two “hero” clients that were margin-negative once you counted all the drama.
• Standardised contracts and moved to 90-day notice as default.
• Promoted a real Head of Delivery and moved client relationships down a level.
• Started reporting clean monthly numbers.

EBITDA moved from 11% to 23%. Contract quality improved. Founder dependency dropped.

The multiple they achieved didn’t change by some miracle of storytelling. But the cheque did.

That’s the power of a deliberate Exit Sprint.

Think in quarters, not chaos.

Q1: Diagnose and Decide
Baseline your Deal Friction Index.
Get honest about margins, contracts, data, leadership, and risk.
Decide what you will not fix (some things can stay messy).

Q2: Fix the High-Leverage Problems
Reprice the worst offenders.
Standardise contracts.
Start transferring key relationships away from you.

Q3: Prove It in the Numbers
Show margin uplift and better revenue quality in your reporting.
Tighten leadership and ops rhythms.
Draft your data room structure.

Q4: Lock In the Story
Clean data room.
Tidy risk register.
Leadership incentives aligned.
Clear narrative: “Here’s what we fixed, here’s how it shows up in the numbers, here’s where this can go.”

Remember: you can’t control market multiples. You can control how acquirable you look when the right buyer shows up.

Turn This Into Action: The Exit Assessment

Reading this is useful. Scoring yourself is better. Turning that score into a plan is where the value is created.

That’s what the Exit Assessment is for.

Built from real data on successful agency sales, this assessment shows founders where they stand today on the path to exit. In less than 3 minutes, you’ll get:

• Your agency’s exit-readiness score across 5 critical value drivers buyers care about
• The #1 factor limiting your valuation, and how to start fixing it
• Specific insights into what’s blocking your growth, with practical steps to start addressing it

Take the Exit Assessment and turn the next 12 months into an Exit Sprint on your terms, not a panic response to someone else’s timeline.

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