Leadership
Preparing Your Company for a Private Equity Exit
How founders between £5M and £20M can assess readiness, plan value improvement, execute change and negotiate smarter exits.
9 Figure Exit How I Built and Sold to Private Equity (Alexis Sikorsky Interview)
Video from Buyers & Builders.
Generated from the canonical interview transcript and validated against source data by Guests on Air.
How do founders prepare a £5M–£20M company for a private equity exit?
Assess your numbers, customer value and founder dependencies, build a focused four-year plan, then execute monthly milestones and prepare a clean data room. Do due diligence on potential buyers and negotiate governance, earnouts and role terms. The APeX rhythm—assess, plan, execute, exit—turns exit ambition into an operational discipline founders can follow.
Alexis Sikorsky built a Switzerland-based software business and later sold it in a multi‑stage private equity process that ultimately cleared nine figures. In the Buyers & Builders conversation he describes the practical faults he sees in founder-led growth, explains the APeX method—assess, plan, execute, exit—and shows why exits are engineered long before a buyer ever appears.
Founders often mistake ambition for readiness: fast growth or a big pipeline does not equal a sellable business. Alexis highlights a blunt readiness test—could the founder disappear for a week without calls or email—and explains how dependency on a single client or the founder’s daily work typically collapses value during due diligence.
This article turns the interview into a practical checklist. You will learn what to measure in an assessment, how to prioritise the four-year improvement plan, how to keep execution disciplined and what to negotiate in the exit. The focus is concrete: fixes founders can implement now to make their businesses attractive to private equity.
Key takeaways
- Assess your real numbers and client pulse before you plan an exit; most founders don’t know them.
- Plan for a maximum four-year value-improvement window; long, vague roadmaps lose momentum and buyers.
- Execute monthly milestones with hired-in C-suite thinking, even if you buy that skill fractionally.
- Do buyer due diligence and negotiate post-deal governance, earnouts and role terms before signing.
1. Assess: Know what you actually own
Start assessment by documenting three items clearly: numbers, customers and the founder’s unique tasks. Alexis repeatedly observed founders who lacked monthly reporting, who relied on a single large client, or who could not explain their USP in a single sentence. Those gaps become the first failures private equity finds during due diligence, and they are fixable with disciplined bookkeeping and customer surveys.
Measure customer satisfaction and repeat purchase behavior as early priorities. Alexis asks founders to call a sample of clients and to measure how often they would return. If you can’t speak with clients personally, put a structured NPS or follow-up call process in place. Buyers pay for proven retention and clear acquisition economics, not hopeful marketing plans or founder charisma.
Audit founder dependency and operational single points of failure. Alexis uses a literal experiment: take a one‑week vacation without a phone and see if the company keeps running. If it collapses, you need documented processes, delegated decision rights and a fractional C-suite to create resilience before you plan an exit. For a related perspective, read Turning Setbacks Into Exits: Alexis Sikorsky on planning a sellable business.
2. Plan and execute: Four years, then act
Turn assessment into a short, focused plan with a clear timer. Alexis rejects ten‑year fantasies and insists on plans you can deliver in four years or less. Translate goals into quarterly milestones, revenue levers and one or two concrete M&A targets. That timetable forces prioritisation: decide what you will stop doing so you can invest in the value drivers that buyers care about.
Choose the right growth levers for speed and measurability. For many companies M&A is the fastest, cheapest growth engine because leverage and existing customer lists accelerate scale. If you prefer organic growth, lock the metrics you will move each month. Alexis emphasises execution cadence: monthly review, rapid problem solving and an honest look at whether you can hire fractional operators to fill skill gaps.
Protect execution with governance and people plans that remove founder bottlenecks. Alexis recommends hiring experienced part-time C-suite advisers when full-time hires are unaffordable. These operators can run three‑ to six‑month interventions to fix reporting, sales structure or product roadmaps, and they leave a repeatable system that buyers value. For a related perspective, read Cashing Out: Exit planning and scale lessons from Alexis Sikorsky.
3. Exit: Do your private equity homework
Treat the deal as a partnership and run due diligence on buyers, not just their price. Alexis warns that founders frequently accept offers without researching the private equity firm, its track record or its cultural fit. Call references, review past exits and ask how the buyer handled people and earnouts. A high valuation from the wrong buyer can create months of grief during integration.
Negotiate the contract beyond headline price: governance, earnout mechanics and your role matter. Alexis explains that private equity firms will often model a company with a cleaner nominal EBITDA after operational fixes. That means founders should understand which costs the buyer expects to remove and how earnouts will be calculated before signing the letter of intent.
Prepare the data room and your team for a six‑month colonoscopy of due diligence. Alexis’s experience shows private equity will probe numbers, tech and contracts; a tidy data room and a prepared leadership team speed the process and reduce valuation erosion. The better you simulate the buyer’s questions in advance, the less value you will leak during negotiation and diligence. The same exit-planning framework is explored in Alexis Sikorsky's book, Cashing Out: The business owner’s guide to selling to private equity, which applies APEX to scaling a business and preparing for a private equity sale.
