Thinking of exiting your IT business? It starts with focus.
If you own an IT business and have started thinking about selling it one day, one of the first questions that might come to mind is:
“What’s my business worth?”
It’s an understandable question. But I’d suggest there’s another question worth asking first:
“What would need to change for this business to operate successfully without me?”
I co-founded an IT business in 2004 and eventually sold it in 2019. Looking back, one of the biggest lessons I took from that experience is that preparing a business for a future sale starts long before the valuation, negotiations and due diligence.
When you’re running an IT business, it’s easy to become absorbed in the day-to-day. Customers need attention. Your team needs decisions. Opportunities arise. Problems need solving. And, before you know it, much of the business can still revolve around you.
But once you begin seriously considering a future exit, I believe you need to start looking at your business differently.
You need to consider what somebody else would eventually be buying.
Is it a business that can operate successfully without you? Does it have the right team and leadership structure? Is revenue predictable? Are the systems and processes repeatable? Are customer relationships embedded within the business rather than dependent on you? Can it continue to generate sales and grow without your constant involvement?
You don’t need to have all the answers immediately. And deciding you might want to sell in the future doesn’t mean you need to speak to a broker or put your business on the market tomorrow.
It means giving yourself the time and space to understand the business you have today, think about the business you may eventually want to sell, and begin identifying what deserves your attention between the two.
That’s why, for me, preparing for a future exit starts with focus.
Preparing for a future exit is a project
One of the biggest lessons I learned when we decided we wanted to sell our IT business was that preparing the business for a future sale needed to be treated as a project.
There wasn’t one single thing we needed to work on. We had to look across the business and consider a number of different areas that could ultimately affect how successfully it could operate without us — and how attractive it might be to somebody else.
For example, how dependent was the business on us as owners? Did we have the right people and leadership structure in place? How predictable was our revenue? Were our systems and processes documented and repeatable? Were customer relationships held by the business rather than just by us? How strong was our sales pipeline? And did we have good visibility of the numbers?
The answers to those questions won’t necessarily reveal a business full of problems that need fixing.
You may already have a strong and successful business.
But looking at it through the lens of a potential future exit can reveal areas that could be strengthened or developed further. And importantly, some of those changes may take time.
Reducing owner dependency, developing the leadership team, increasing recurring revenue or making the way the business operates more repeatable are unlikely to be things you can tackle a few months before you want to sell.
That’s why I believe it helps to think of exit preparation as a project rather than an event.
You can assess where the business is today, think about where you would like it to be, identify the areas that deserve attention and then decide what matters most.
You don’t have to work on everything at once.
The aim is to gain enough clarity to decide where to focus first — and then start making deliberate progress.
And there’s an important benefit to all of this, even if your plans eventually change.
Most of the things that can help prepare an IT business for a future exit — reducing its dependence on the owner, developing the team, creating more predictable revenue, improving systems and understanding the numbers — can also help you build a stronger business today.
So even if you eventually decide not to sell, the work hasn’t been wasted. You’ve created a stronger business and given yourself more choice about what happens next.
So where do you start?
Once you’ve decided that a future exit is something you genuinely want to work towards, it can be tempting to start making changes straight away.
But before deciding what to work on, I think it’s important to get a clearer picture of the business as it stands today.
That means looking beyond whether the business is profitable or growing and considering it from a broader perspective.
For an IT business owner, there are a number of areas worth exploring.
Owner dependency - How much still relies on you? What would happen if you stepped away from the business for a month?
Team and leadership - Do you have the right people in the right roles? Is there a leadership team capable of making decisions and running the business without you?
Revenue - How predictable is it? How much comes from recurring services, managed services, software licensing or other repeatable sources?
Customers - Is revenue spread across a healthy customer base, or are you heavily dependent on a small number of key accounts? And who owns those relationships?
Sales - Can the business consistently generate new opportunities and win new customers without relying on you personally?
Financial visibility - Do you have accurate, timely information that gives you a clear understanding of how the business is performing?
Systems and processes - Is the way you deliver your services documented and repeatable, or does too much knowledge still sit inside people’s heads?
Positioning - Is it clear what your business does, who it does it for and why customers choose you rather than somebody else?
Risk - Are there contracts, intellectual property, supplier dependencies, compliance issues or other potential risks that deserve attention?
The purpose of looking at these areas isn’t to produce a list of everything that’s wrong with the business.
It’s to create an honest picture of where the business is today.
Some areas may already be in excellent shape. Others may present opportunities to strengthen the business further. And there may be one or two that deserve more immediate attention.
Once you can see that bigger picture, it becomes much easier to decide what actually matters.
Because preparing for a future exit doesn’t mean trying to improve everything simultaneously.
It means understanding where you are, deciding where you want to be, and choosing where to focus first.
You can’t work on everything at once
Once you start looking at your business through the lens of a potential future exit, it’s quite possible that you’ll identify a number of areas you’d like to strengthen.
Perhaps you want to reduce the business’s dependence on you.
You might need to develop your leadership team, increase recurring revenue, document important processes, improve financial reporting or build a more consistent sales pipeline.
The temptation can be to start working on all of them.
But that can quickly become overwhelming — particularly when you’re still running the business at the same time.
One of the most valuable things you can do at this point is prioritise.
Which areas could make the biggest difference to the strength of the business?
Which are likely to take the longest?
Are there things that need to happen before other improvements become possible?
And which areas, although important, can wait?
This is where I think focus becomes particularly important.
Not every good idea needs to become a priority today.
Some things need your attention now. Some can deliberately be delayed until later. And occasionally, you may realise that something you thought was important doesn’t really need doing at all.
The objective is to avoid creating an enormous exit-preparation to-do list and instead identify the relatively small number of things that deserve your attention most.
In our own IT business, some of the changes that ultimately helped make the business stronger took considerable time. Developing people, reducing our own involvement and creating more repeatable ways of operating weren’t things we could simply tick off a list.
They required sustained attention. That’s why prioritisation matters.
Once you know where the business is today and where you’d like it to be, the question becomes: what is the most important thing to work on next?
And sometimes, making meaningful progress on one important area over the next 90 days will achieve far more than trying to make a little progress on ten.
Turn your priorities into 90-day outcomes
Preparing a business for a future exit is unlikely to be a 90-day project.
Depending on where the business is today and what you want to achieve, it could be one to two years or longer before you feel the business is genuinely ready to take to market.
That’s another reason why it helps to treat exit preparation as a project.
A one- or two-year objective can feel distant and difficult to manage. Breaking that bigger project down into 90-day blocks makes it much more manageable.
I found 90 days worked well in our own business.
It’s long enough to make meaningful progress on something important, but short enough to maintain focus and create a sense of momentum. Rather than trying to think about everything that needs to happen before a future sale, you can concentrate on what deserves your attention now.
Let’s say you’ve identified owner dependency as one of your most important priorities.
“Make the business less dependent on me” may be the right long-term ambition, but it’s too broad to be particularly useful as an action plan.
Instead, ask:
“What meaningful progress could we make on this over the next 90 days?”
Perhaps there are operational decisions that still come to you that could be delegated.
Maybe one of your senior people is ready to take greater responsibility, but their role needs to be developed.
Perhaps key customer relationships are still centred around you and need to be broadened across the team.
Or there may be important processes that only you really understand and that need to be documented so somebody else can take ownership of them.
Once you’ve decided what you want to achieve over the next 90 days, you can work backwards and identify the practical actions required to get there.
Who needs to take responsibility? What needs to happen first? What conversations need to take place? What needs to be documented, delegated or changed? And how will you know you’ve made meaningful progress?
At the end of the 90 days, you can step back again.
Review what you’ve achieved. Reassess where the business is. Decide whether the same area still deserves your attention or whether another priority should come next.
Then begin the next 90-day block.
Preparing for a future exit may be a longer-term project. But breaking that project into 90-day blocks turns something potentially overwhelming into a series of manageable, focused periods of progress.
Over time, those individual blocks begin to add up.
And gradually, you’re not simply preparing a business for a possible future sale.
You’re building a stronger business along the way.
Protect the time to make it happen
Having a clear 90-day outcome and a plan is one thing.
Finding the time to actually work on it while you’re running an IT business is another.
This is where I think many longer-term business projects can struggle.
The work involved in preparing for a future exit is important, but it may not always feel urgent.
A customer issue is urgent.
A member of the team needing a decision feels urgent.
A proposal that needs completing, a supplier problem or an unexpected operational issue can all demand your immediate attention.
Improving the leadership structure, documenting processes, reducing owner dependency or developing a more predictable sales pipeline can usually wait until tomorrow.
And tomorrow can very easily become next week, next month or next quarter.
That’s why, once you’ve decided what your 90-day priority is, I think you need to deliberately protect some time and attention for it.
That might mean putting regular time in your diary to work on the project.
It could mean involving other members of your leadership team and giving them ownership of particular actions.
And it means regularly reviewing progress rather than waiting until the end of the 90 days to discover that the day-to-day running of the business has taken over again.
A simple weekly review can help.
What progress did we make this week?
What needs to happen next?
Is anything getting in the way?
And do we still have our attention on the things we agreed mattered most?
This isn’t about rigidly sticking to a plan when circumstances change. Running a business will always involve adapting.
It’s about making sure that the important longer-term work doesn’t continually lose out to whatever happens to be most urgent today.
Because deciding that you want to prepare your business for a future exit is relatively easy. Creating the space to do the work consistently is what turns that intention into progress.
And if you can maintain that focus over successive 90-day periods, the business you’re running a year or two from now could look very different from the one you’re running today.
Preparing the business is only part of the picture
There’s another part of preparing for a future exit that can be easy to overlook. You.
You can spend a great deal of time thinking about whether the business is ready for somebody else to own, but it’s equally important to think about whether you’re ready for what comes next.
For many IT business owners, the business has been a significant part of their life for years.
You may have started it from scratch, built the team, developed relationships with customers and suppliers, made thousands of decisions and worked through plenty of difficult periods along the way.
Being the owner can become part of your identity.
So deciding that you might eventually want to sell isn’t purely a business decision.
It’s a personal one too.
What would you actually like life to look like after the business?
Do you want to stop working completely, or would you like to do something different?
Would you like more time with your family, more freedom to travel, or simply more control over how you spend your time?
Perhaps you’d like to invest in other businesses, become a non-executive director, start something new or use the experience you’ve gained to help other people.
There isn’t a right answer.
What matters is beginning to understand what you want the business to make possible for you.
That thinking can also influence some of the decisions you make while you still own it.
If you want the freedom to step away eventually, for example, becoming less central to the day-to-day running of the business is important not only from a potential buyer’s perspective.
It can also help you begin adjusting to a different role before you sell.
And there’s another reason I think this matters.
You may go through all this work and ultimately decide that selling isn’t what you want after all.
But if you’ve built a stronger business that’s less dependent on you, surrounded yourself with a capable team and created more freedom in your own role, you’ve still achieved something extremely valuable.
Preparing yourself for a future exit isn’t about deciding exactly what the next chapter of your life will look like today.
It’s about giving yourself the space to think about it — and making sure that, as the business becomes less dependent on you, you’re also becoming clearer about what you want from the future.
Because ultimately, exit readiness isn’t only about having a business that could be ready to sell.
It’s about having an owner who is ready to choose what happens next.
A practical place to start
Everything I’ve described so far — stepping away from the day-to-day, thinking about what you want from the future, assessing the business, deciding what matters most and turning those priorities into focused action — is the thinking behind something I’ve created called the Exit Readiness Focus Framework.
I created it specifically for IT business owners who are beginning to think seriously about a potential future exit but may be asking themselves:
“Where do I actually start?”
It isn’t a valuation tool, and it won’t tell you what your business is worth.
It isn’t a guide to finding a buyer, negotiating a deal or navigating the legal and financial aspects of a sale.
Those are areas where experienced mergers and acquisitions (M&A) advisers, accountants, solicitors and other specialists have an important role to play when the time is right.
The Exit Readiness Focus Framework is designed for the work that comes before that.
It helps you step away from the day-to-day and think about what you want personally, as well as what you want for the business.
It helps you take an honest look at where the business is today across the areas that could influence its readiness for a future sale.
It helps you identify what deserves your attention, decide what to prioritise and turn those priorities into practical 90-day outcomes.
And importantly, it helps you protect the time and attention needed to actually make progress.
The framework follows five stages:
PAUSE → CLARIFY → PRIORITISE → COMMIT → PROTECT
- PAUSE gives you the space to step away from the day-to-day and think.
- CLARIFY helps you become clearer about the future you want and the business you have today.
- PRIORITISE helps you decide what deserves your attention — and what can wait.
- COMMIT turns your priorities into clear outcomes and practical actions.
- PROTECT helps you create the time and attention to follow through, review progress and keep moving forward.
The purpose isn’t to create a perfect business before you speak to an adviser or potential buyer.
And it certainly isn’t to guarantee that you’ll eventually sell.
It’s about helping you begin the preparation early, approach it deliberately and build a stronger business that gives you greater choice about the future.
Whether that eventually means selling the business, stepping back from it, or deciding that you’re quite happy to keep owning it.
That choice is ultimately yours.
You don’t need an exit date to start preparing
You don’t need to know exactly when you want to sell your IT business before you start preparing for the possibility.
In fact, I think there’s a real advantage in starting the thinking before you have a firm exit date.
It gives you time.
Time to look at the business objectively. Time to strengthen the areas that deserve attention. Time to develop your team, reduce the business’s dependence on you and make changes without the pressure of an imminent sale.
And perhaps most importantly, it gives you choice.
You might eventually decide to sell.
You might decide to step back and allow your leadership team to run more of the business.
Or you might build a business that gives you greater freedom and decide you’re quite happy to continue owning it.
That’s why I believe the starting point isn’t necessarily:
“When do I want to sell?”
A more useful question might be:
“What would need to change for this business to operate successfully without me?”
Give yourself the space to answer that honestly. Look at where the business is today.
Decide what deserves your attention. Then start making progress, one priority at a time.
Because preparing for a potential future exit isn’t only about getting a business ready to sell.
It’s about building a stronger business today and giving yourself more choice about tomorrow.
Ready to take the first step?
I created the Exit Readiness Focus Framework as a practical starting point for IT business owners who are beginning to think about a potential future exit.
It will help you step back, clarify what you want, assess where your business is today, decide what matters most and turn your priorities into focused action.
Download the free Exit Readiness Focus Framework and start working through it in your own time.