Exit readiness gets treated, in most portfolios, as something that starts roughly a year before a planned sale process, when advisors get engaged and the data room starts getting assembled properly. 

By the time that work starts, most of what actually determines how the process goes has already been decided, quietly, over the preceding two years, by decisions nobody was making with an exit specifically in mind. 

The clean, defensible metrics that survive a buyer’s diligence team, the ones discussed in the NRR piece above, aren’t something you build in the run-up to a sale. They’re something you either have been building consistently for years or you’re scrambling to reconstruct under serious time pressure, and reconstruction under time pressure rarely produces numbers a buyer’s advisors find convincing. 

The same is true of management team depth. A buyer evaluating whether the business is genuinely resilient beyond one or two key people is looking at hiring and succession decisions made two or three years earlier, not anything that can be fixed in the twelve months before a process starts. 

The practical implication is that exit readiness isn’t a phase, it’s a lens that should quietly inform ordinary operating decisions from fairly early in the hold. Not by running the business as though a sale is imminent, that produces its own distortions, but by asking, periodically, whether a given metric or a given management decision would hold up to genuinely sceptical outside scrutiny, and treating any gap that surfaces as worth closing now rather than later. 

Two years before a sale process starts is roughly when it stops being possible to fix the things that matter most, which is exactly why it’s worth thinking about that far ahead, even when a sale itself feels a long way off.