If you've built a business over the past twenty or thirty years, there's a good chance you're assuming the ending looks something like this: you list it, a buyer shows up, you walk away with a check that funds the next chapter of your life.
For most owners, that's not how it goes. Research from the Exit Planning Institute puts the number at 70% to 80% of businesses that go to market never sell (Exit Planning Institute, State of Owner Readiness). Not "sell for less than hoped." Never sell at all. The owner takes it off the market, closes the doors, or hands it down informally and hopes for the best.
This isn't a business problem in the way most owners picture it. Profitable, well-run companies fail to sell all the time. The gap is almost always between how the business looks to the person who built it and how it looks to someone writing a check for it.
Thinking about a sale in the next few years? Schedule a complimentary consultation with Ben Loughery.
1. The timeline is closer than most owners think
Roughly half of business owners — 49%, per EPI's 2023 National State of Owner Readiness Report — plan to exit within five years. Widen the window to a decade and that number climbs to about 73%, representing an estimated $14 trillion in business value expected to change hands (Exit Planning Institute, 2023). Different surveys report slightly different cuts of this — five years versus ten, "plan to exit" versus "want to exit" — but the direction is consistent. A large share of privately held businesses are approaching a transition, and a large share of their owners haven't started preparing for one.
2. Buyers are pricing risk, not effort
A business that depends heavily on its owner — for sales relationships, for institutional knowledge, for day-to-day decisions — is harder for a buyer to underwrite. It doesn't matter how many hours went into building it. Buyers are trying to answer one question: will this still perform the same way once the current owner is gone? Customer concentration, thin management depth, and financial records that live mostly in the owner's head all make that question harder to answer with confidence, and a harder question usually means a lower offer or no offer.
3. Most owners haven't documented a plan
Only about 32% of business owners have a written exit plan, and closer to a quarter have aligned their personal, business, and financial goals ahead of a sale (Exit Planning Institute, 2023 National State of Owner Readiness Report). That leaves a large majority approaching one of the biggest financial events of their life without a roadmap for it. Preparation here isn't a single document. It's a sequence: a business valuation, a look at what's driving or dragging that value, a personal financial plan for what happens to the proceeds, and enough runway — usually two to three years, sometimes more — to act on all of it before a buyer is at the table.
4. Preparation changes the odds, not just the price
Owners who go through a structured readiness process before listing tend to see two things improve: the likelihood the deal actually closes, and the number attached to it when it does. A current valuation shows where the business stands today. An honest look at owner dependency shows what a buyer will flag first. And a personal financial plan — one that maps the sale proceeds against retirement income, taxes, and what life looks like on the other side — turns "sell the business" from a vague goal into a plan with a start date.
This is where the planning side of an exit tends to get underweighted. Owners spend years optimizing the business itself and comparatively little time on what happens to the money once it's no longer tied up in the company — how it's taxed, how it's invested, and how it needs to be structured to support the next several decades.
I use Maus, an exit planning platform built around the Value Acceleration Methodology, to walk business-owner clients through this earlier and with more structure than a conversation alone allows. In practice, that means a current valuation range, a readiness score that flags what a buyer would see first (owner dependency, customer concentration, weak financial documentation), and a report the client can actually sit with instead of a set of impressions from a single meeting. For an owner who's still a few years out, it turns "you should probably start thinking about this" into a specific list of what to fix and in what order.
If you're thinking about a sale in the next few years — or you're not sure where your business would stand today — a short conversation can clarify what's worth addressing now versus later. Schedule a call with Ben Loughery to talk through where your business and your personal financial plan currently stand.
Where does your business fall in that first stat?
The 70-to-80% figure isn't a prediction about any one business. It's a reflection of how many owners approach a sale without having done the preparation that separates a completed transaction from a listing that eventually comes off the market without a word. The owners who land in the smaller group tend to start the process years before they list, not months. If you're several years out from an exit, that timeline is still on your side. If you're closer, the sooner you can see where the gaps are, the more room you have to close them.
Ben Loughery, CFP®, CRPC™, is the founder of Lock Wealth Management, a fee-only fiduciary firm in Atlanta helping business owners and pre-retirees plan for tax-smart, sustainable retirement income.
