Business Exit
Sell a Business a Buyer Cannot Regret Buying
Mark Mills explains why exit value comes from a proven model, a documented pipeline and the patience to refuse the first offer.
Steve Rastall interviews Mark Mills, a non-executive director and business advisor
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How do you prepare a business so a buyer pays full value?
Start 12 to 30 months before you want to sell. Refine the proposition and the business model first, document everything so a buyer never fears looking foolish, and map how customers actually buy into a pipeline with probabilities. Then find serious buyers yourself, keep someone unemotional in the room, and never accept the first offer.
Mark Mills has built companies, sold them, and spent the last 15 years helping other owners do the same. He and his brother sold a post box advertising business twice, and he later built a cash machine company with 300 people across three countries. Speaking with host Steve Rastall, he set out what separates a well priced exit from a frustrating one.
His central idea is simple and slightly uncomfortable. Most owners assume that because they can run a business, they know how to sell one. Mills compares it to selling a house when you never fixed the leaky roof. You know how to live there, but you are not ready for a buyer who will inspect everything, warts and all.
What follows are the habits Mills uses with the companies he advises: a realistic timeline, a business model interrogated to a granular degree, a sales pipeline a buyer can see, and a negotiating stance that treats the first offer as an opening move rather than a gift. Each one adds value even if the sale never happens.
Key takeaways
- Plan on 12 to 30 months to sell a business at the right value, not the six months most owners hope for.
- Refine the proposition and business model before fixing the team, because good people execute a plan that already works.
- Document everything so a buyer never fears looking foolish, and map how customers buy into a pipeline with probabilities.
- Refuse the first offer, find serious buyers yourself, and keep an unemotional adviser in the room when pressure peaks.
1. Give the sale the time it actually takes
Mills says almost every owner he meets wants to sell within six months. His answer is that a sale done for the right value usually takes between 12 and 30 months. His wife asks why he tells people something they do not want to hear. He tells them because it is the truth, and because an adviser's real contribution is experience of how long these things take.
He has a trick for owners who set long horizons. If someone says five years, he asks them to name the actual year and work backwards from it, because plans always drift to the right. Pinning a date turns a vague ambition into a schedule, and it exposes how much work has to happen in each of the years before the deal.
Time also works in the owner's favour. Mills points out that a business under active improvement should naturally get better while the sale is prepared. He turns the usual process on its head: the company is not for sale while the work is being done. Value is built first, and only when the business is ready does he go looking for buyers.
2. Build a business nobody looks stupid buying
The first thing Mills works on is what he calls a stupidity avoidance policy. A buyer does not want to sign the papers and then hear someone in the pub ask why on earth they bought that company. So everything is tidied up, in good order and documented, and the business runs on all cylinders with a model that holds up under scrutiny.
That means starting with the proposition and the model before the management team. Owners often tell Mills they need to sort their managers out first. He looks at what the company does and whether doing more of it makes money, because if the model is not profitable, growth only deepens the loss. Once the plan is right, great people are easier to find.
The second lever is the sales pipeline. Mills uses a simple spreadsheet that plots the path a customer takes from suspect to prospect to buyer, with probabilities attached to each stage. His view is that most customers buy in much the same way and on a similar timeline, so a written path lets a buyer see what the business is likely to sell in the years ahead.
3. Hold your nerve when the offer arrives
Mills learned the value of patience early. When an advertising company made an offer for his post box business, the number was far more than he and his brother expected. He was shaking when he rang his brother, yet they held to their rule of never accepting a first offer. A week of silence later, the buyer came back and doubled it.
He now sees himself as the one person on the owner's side who cares most about the outcome. Lawyers and corporate finance advisers earn roughly the same fee whether the price is chipped or not. Mills sets the terms early, telling buyers that a late night attempt to knock money off the price will end the meeting, and he has walked out of rooms to prove it.
The reason is emotion. When a deal matters to the family or to paying the wages, owners are tempted to soften and take what is offered. Deal fever affects both sides of the table, and an adviser with financial independence can stay calm and say no. As Mills puts it, the cash in the bank after fees and tax is what the owner can actually spend.
