The best private equity exits are engineered long before a buyer appears

Founders often wait until they are ready to sell before asking whether the business is actually sellable, which usually means the weakest parts of the company are exposed when leverage matters most. Alexis learned this firsthand while building and selling New Access through a staged nine-figure private equity exit, where boardroom reality looked very different from the simple exit advice founders often hear online. Through his Cashing Out work and APeX methodology, he shows founders how to Assess the business, Plan the value-improvement work, Execute the operational fixes and prepare for eXit before a buyer is in the room. For £5M–£20M founders, this conversation turns exit planning from a distant ambition into a practical operating discipline.

About Alexis Sikorsky

Alexis Sikorsky, podcast guest

#1 International Bestselling Author and Special Advisor to Founders of £5M–£20M Businesses, Founder Bottleneck and Private Equity Exit Strategist

$100M+ Private equity exit500+ Employees scaled at New Access#1 International bestselling author£5M–£20M Founder businesses advised by revenue

Alexis Sikorsky is a #1 international bestselling author and Special Advisor to founders of privately held £5M–£20M businesses. Through Knightscale Partners, he helps founder-led companies break through the Five Million Plateau, remove founder dependency, build the senior operating layer they are missing, and prepare for scale, recapitalisation or private equity exit.

He moved into this work after founding, scaling and selling New Access, a Switzerland-based private banking software company, through a staged nine-figure private equity exit. That experience showed him the gap between generic online advice and what actually happens in boardrooms when founders are preparing for liquidity, negotiating with investors, or realising the business cannot keep scaling while every major decision still runs through them.

Today, Alexis works with founders at the point where the habits that built the company start to limit the company. A founder can be the biggest asset in the early years, but around the £5M–£20M stage, they can become the bottleneck if the business still relies on their memory, energy, relationships and constant intervention. At Knightscale Partners, Alexis works alongside co-founder Topher Morrison and a roster of experienced senior operators to give founder-led businesses access to the C-suite thinking they need before they are ready to hire a full-time executive team.

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EP309 - Building a Business That’s Designed to Scale and Exit with Alexis Sikorsky
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