Founder to Exit: Maximize Enterprise Value Using the #1 Bestselling Good to Growing Framework - ebook

Two founders sell nearly identical businesses — same $3 million in earnings. One walks away with $18 million. The other with $30 million. The difference was not the banker.  

It was the eighteen months before the banker was ever called.

There is a specific silence that follows the close of a significant sale — the quiet arithmetic of what you actually received for what you actually built. The founders who sit in that silence with the arithmetic of regret are almost never the ones who were out-negotiated. They are the ones who arrived at the table with a business that had not been prepared to be sold.

In Founder to Exit, Scott Winters — responsible for exits totaling hundreds of millions of dollars — makes a case most founders hear too late: the premium isn't negotiated. It's built. Buyers are not paying for your revenue, your product, or even your team. They are paying for proof — documented, verifiable evidence that the revenue is real and recurring, the growth is a repeatable engine rather than founder heroics, and the business will run in your absence. The multiple is set by the buyer's perception of risk, and proof is what removes it.

This book is for founders of established businesses — roughly $5M to $100M in revenue — who are eighteen months to five years from a transaction and still have time to build toward a premium instead of rushing toward a close.

Using the proven Good to Growing framework, you'll learn how to:

• See the real multiple your business commands today — and the specific characteristics that move it up or hold it down
• Produce the honest, evidence-based portrait a buyer can actually trust in diligence
• Resolve the weaknesses a buyer would otherwise find and price as risk — before they ever find them
• Build the transferability that removes you from the critical path, the single thing buyers fear most
• Create the documented operating discipline a buyer cannot manufacture and will pay a premium to acquire

It does not steer you toward one kind of buyer. The same preparation makes a business undeniable to a strategic acquirer, a private equity firm, a management team, or an ESOP — and undeniable businesses command premium multiples from every category of buyer.

The number you're afraid of leaving behind is not fixed. It's buildable. This book builds it