This founder runs a finance transformation firm built over years of saying yes: yes to clients, yes to scope, yes to logos. By the time an exit was on the horizon, the firm was really several businesses stacked on each other. Implementation work. A productized post-implementation retainer. An outsourced operations arm built for a client that lost its own team during COVID. A product. And a time-and-materials bucket the founder was steadily shrinking.
Rather than guess which of those a buyer would value, this founder went and found out: studying the question inside C54, and entertaining calls with potential buyers long before hiring an M&A firm, purely to hear what they asked about.
Implementation was the firm’s origin and, for years, the bulk of its revenue. It was also the line a buyer would not pay for.
So the operating model moved to match. Pods restructured around converting projects into retainers. Bonuses tied to retention and Net Promoter Scores rather than delivery. The productized “we implemented it, now what?” work pushed to the front of the offer, which turned out to open bigger partner doors too. And the books rebuilt to tell the story those buyer conversations said mattered.