Welcome back to another edition of The Wise Exit newsletter. This week, we're covering:

Let's get to it.

Every Founder Needs a Chief Exit Officer. Most Don't Have One.

You'd never run your business without someone owning your financials. Or your marketing. Or your ops.

At some point, those roles get filled. Even if it's just you wearing every hat for a while.

But there's one role almost no founder fills. Even though it can affect their life's biggest financial event.

A Chief Exit Officer.

Someone whose job is to think about your exit continuously, long before you're actually selling. Someone tracking whether your business is becoming more or less attractive to a buyer every quarter, not just the year you decide to go to market.

When I sold my own business, that role didn't exist within my team. We were largely on our own trying to figure out the exit process while also running the company. By the time we brought in real expertise, we'd already created issues in our process that we didn’t understand.

The businesses that walk away with the best outcomes usually have someone in that seat the whole way through. Not running a formal sale process. Just watching the business the way a buyer eventually will, and flagging what needs to change long before it's urgent.

If you're 12 to 18 months out, or even just building with an eventual exit in mind, that's the role worth filling now.

This is exactly why we built this offering at Exitwise.

It's a flat $2,500/month retainer, built for founders who aren't ready for a full process yet but still want real expertise in their corner. You get two hours of confidential 1-on-1 coaching calls per month, plus offline work done on your behalf (buyer list development, data room setup, or iteration on the exit marketing message. And unlimited email and text access when something comes up and you need an answer fast.

You stay in the driver's seat. This is for founders who want that expertise without handing off the whole process, whether that's because you're not ready to sell yet, or you just want to keep control of how things move for now.

It's one of several ways we work with founders. For those who do want a full team running the process for them, that's exactly what our advisory engagements are built for. But if you're earlier than that, this is the option built for that stage.

1️⃣ If I had to sell in the next 12 months, who's currently thinking about that with me?

2️⃣ Do I know whether my business is becoming more or less valuable to a buyer right now?

3️⃣ Am I the only person tracking whether we're exit-ready?

4️⃣ Have I been treating exit prep as a last-minute scramble instead of an ongoing priority?

5️⃣ What would change if someone were watching this for me every quarter instead of me trying to remember to think about it?

☑️ Name the gap: Ask yourself honestly who owns exit-readiness in your business today. If the answer is nobody, that's on you to fix.

☑️ Start tracking what buyers track: Profitability, margins, customer concentration. A simple monthly check-in moves you forward.

☑️ Talk to someone who can fill that seat: You don't need a full process to get a second set of eyes on your business today.

That's all for this week. Exit prep isn't something you scramble for at the end. It's a role, and it's worth filling long before you need it.

This is something we're actively offering right now. If you want to learn more about how we can work together this way, email me directly at [email protected].

Talk next week,

Brian Dukes
Managing Partner at Exitwise

P.S. We recently" “soft-launched” a new show: Wise Up on M&A, an educational YouTube series that gets back to basics on deal topics. Episode 3 is now live, so please feel free to pass it along to anyone a few years out from their own exit.