There’s a fair amount of received wisdom about what determines whether an exit hits its target multiple, growth rate at exit, market conditions, quality of the banker running the process. All genuinely matter. 

What predicts outcomes more reliably than any of these, in the deals that go well versus the ones that disappoint at the final number, is something that gets decided far earlier and gets far less attention at the time: whether the metrics the business is being sold on are ones that were built to survive scrutiny, or ones that were built to look good internally and never seriously stress-tested against how a buyer’s diligence team will actually treat them. 

This connects directly to points made elsewhere about NRR that survives diligence versus NRR that merely looks good in a board pack, and about data rooms that reflect genuine operational discipline versus ones assembled hastily for the occasion. 

The businesses that hit or exceed their target multiple are disproportionately the ones where these things were treated as ongoing operational discipline throughout the hold, not as a checklist assembled in the final year before a process starts. The businesses that disappoint at the final number are disproportionately the ones where a metric that looked strong internally turned out to have a gap, discovered by the buyer’s advisors during the process itself, that meaningfully changed how the buyer valued the business, sometimes after an agreed price had already been informally discussed. 

The uncomfortable implication is that exit outcome is substantially determined well before the exit process itself begins, by the quality and honesty of the metrics and documentation maintained throughout the hold, not primarily by the skill of the process run at the end. A brilliant banker running a well-timed process on a business with metrics that don’t survive scrutiny will still produce a disappointing outcome relative to what the headline numbers suggested going in. 

A well-run business with genuinely clean, defensible metrics tends to produce a strong outcome even in a mediocre process, because the underlying evidence does most of the work. 

The practical takeaway, and it’s really the thread running through everything in this collection: the work that determines your exit multiple mostly happens quietly, in ordinary months, long before anyone’s thinking about an exit process at all.