A short, honest read on how ready your business — and you — are for the exit you actually want.
See how likely your business is to actually sell, set against the businesses that do.
Spot the single biggest gap between where you are and an exit on your terms.
Get an indicative value picture — today versus properly prepared.
~2 min · 16 questions · no sign-up · answers save automatically
Ian RoundellFounder
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Ian Roundell has advised owner-managed businesses since 2013 — first with institutional investors in the City, then running his own advisory business. A chartered accountant, he works with UK SME owners one to three years out from exit — architecting the route around their objectives, engineering value, and staying alongside through completion. Fee-for-service, aligned to establishing and achieving your exit objectives, not a transaction completion fee.
Chartered accountant · Advising UK owner-managed businesses since 2013LinkedIn →
The most useful next step is a short, no-obligation conversation. Leave your details below and we'll be in touch — your result comes with it, so there's nothing to explain.
— or, if you'd rather, email us directly —
hello@architectyourexit.co.uk
Want more? Two optional deep-dives
First — will an exit even happen?
It's the question almost nobody asks, and it matters far more than the price. Most businesses that go to market simply never sell.
The pool that actually sells — about 3 in 10
Across every business that considers selling, only about three in ten ever complete a sale (Exit Planning Institute). Those three are the properly-prepared businesses — the ones a buyer takes seriously and pays a real price for.
INSIDE THE PREPARED POOL — CHANCE OF COMPLETING
The five things a buyer quietly prices
Whatever the sector, serious buyers price the same five drivers again and again. This is how your answers read against each — a quick, qualitative read on the levers that most move the number and the probability of a completed sale.
Engaging a corporate financier or an accountant to sell, unprepared, is how many owners end up disappointed: they're paid when a deal completes, so their job is to market what you already have — not to spend the roughly eighteen months it takes to make it saleable, around what you actually want from it. There is another practical constraint: because they're set up to complete trade sales, that is the route they tend to take you down. Alternatives that might suit you better — an EOT, a partial exit, a phased handover to management or family — rarely get put on the table.
Your readiness picture
Your six readiness dimensions
Where you're strong, where the work is
And are you ready to run it?
The odds above are about the business. This is about you — how ready you are to run the process on your own terms, read across the six dimensions of a well-planned exit. Different question, just as decisive, and the one the people you'd normally turn to tend not to ask until it's too late.
How to read each dimension. Think of it like preparing a house for sale. The four rungs are Rebuild → Renovate → Redecorate → Ready: Rebuild means structural work — the foundations for that dimension aren't there yet and putting them in typically takes twelve to eighteen months; Renovate means the bones are sound but material work is still needed, usually six to twelve months; Redecorate means it's substantially in place and needs finishing touches over a few weeks to a few months; Ready means a buyer would find nothing to pick at here. Most owners start at "Rebuild" on several dimensions — that's normal, and it's a measure of how much work each area is likely to need, not a judgement of you. The dimensions carry different weight in the plan: how the business is built and owner alignment matter more to a sale than pure awareness of the options, and the scoring reflects that.
The natural next step
That's your readiness read. The most useful thing to do with it is talk it through — a short, no-obligation conversation about what closing your biggest gaps would take. Enter your email in the short form (one click sends your details and emails you a full copy of the result) — no need to open a separate email.
Below, if it's useful: an indicative value picture (optional — it asks for a few figures) and what a full Blueprint covers. Neither is needed to get in touch.
Could you get what you want? (optional)
What the business could indicatively be worth today — and, on the same basis, what it could be worth properly prepared. Two figures, not a valuation.
The roughest part of all this, and entirely optional — a deliberately high-level, indicative sense of whether the figure you have in mind is even in the right postcode. It is not a valuation: the real answer depends on the readiness above and on many things specific to your business that only a proper assessment would weigh. Skip it if you'd rather — you don't need it to get in touch. The figures stay in your browser.
Some businesses are valued off revenue — and it shows the margin.
Profit before interest, tax and one-offs, stripped of anything unusual. A round figure is fine.
So we compare your slice, not the whole company, to what you want.
Your target — not a hoped-for maximum, the figure that makes your next chapter work.
Nothing here is sent anywhere. It's worked out in your browser, for you.
Indicative only — not a valuation
As it stands today
—
Indicative, on your current readiness
Properly prepared, could be
—
With the value-changing work done first — a big "if"
As it stands todayPreparedThe amount you want
Remember what this is really about: not squeezing out the maximum, but knowing your destination — the amount and the timing you need — and staying in control of getting there. If you can realise what you want, that's a good result, whatever the theoretical ceiling. (Where there's more than one owner, it also depends on what they want — which may differ from you.)
This is not a valuation. It's a broad, indicative illustration built only from the figures you entered and current published multiples for your sector — benchmarked to UK mid-market EV/EBITDA data (Dealsuite M&A Monitor, H1 2025, overall average ~5.3x) and cross-checked against typical UK SME transaction ranges, then adjusted for size. A real multiple depends on many things specific to your business — the quality and durability of its earnings, customer concentration, growth, how well it runs without the owner, the state of its market and much else — all of which need proper assessment before any figure means anything. Treat it as a sighting shot to frame a conversation, not a number to rely on or act on. Architect Your Exit is not regulated to give valuation or investment advice, and nothing here is either.
Send yourself this result — and let's talk it through
Leave your details and we'll send you everything you've just seen — your readiness picture, the six dimensions and (if you filled it in) your indicative value picture — then follow up with a short, no-obligation conversation. Your result comes with it, so there's nothing to explain.
This scorecard is a rough sketch. The Exit Design Blueprint is the bespoke exercise that turns it into a plan — built around your objectives, numbers and timing, and designed to get the business genuinely exit-ready. The shape of it:
Exit Design Blueprint
Bespoke to you
Curated, not generated
01Your objectives, decoded — what you (and any co-owners) actually want out of this.
02Where you stand today — a private read against what a serious buyer weighs.
03The routes that fit you — credible ways out, scored against your objectives.
04The value levers — the specific things, in your business, that most move the number.
05Will it actually complete? — an honest read on deal-readiness and owner alignment.
06A curated route map & plan — a sequenced path to the exit you want, built with you.
Route options (illustrative)
Route A
Route B
Route C
Can you reach your number? (illustrative)
Today
Prepared
Built from your own answers — these bars only show the shape.
We've shown five main routes for illustration — in practice there are hybrids and others, and what we build is bespoke to the owner(s). Every Blueprint is curated, not auto-generated, against a defined set of principles.
The honest next step
Turn the rough picture into your picture
The one thing this scorecard can't do is the thing that matters most — nothing changes until something is decided. Most owners read a result like this, quietly agree with it, and do nothing for another year. A year of runway is the one asset in an exit you can never buy back.
The next step is that short conversation. Enter your email in the form above (one click sends your details and emails you a full copy of the result) — no need to open a separate email account.
Not a pitch, and no suggestion you should be selling. The conversation is to see whether the Blueprint is right for you — and it stays yours to decide, at every step. That's the whole point of doing it this way.
Adviser view — not shown to the owner
Fit read & talking points
A separate two-minute check — only if it's on your mind
This scorecard leaves one thing out on purpose: how AI could reshape your business model — what it might replace in what you sell, and where it could cut cost or lift margin. It's becoming its own question, and it's starting to move what a business is worth. If that's a live concern for you, it has its own short tool — but there's no need to do it now.
Architect Your Exit works with owners to shape the route around their objectives — surfacing every viable path, engineering the value, and staying alongside through completion. This scorecard is a starting point, not advice, and the figures are indicative only.
