Todd Rapp is working toward an exit and admits he cannot tell a good week from a bad one. He thinks most weeks land in about the same place. What changes is where he is standing.
Todd Rapp is the CEO of Rapp Strategies, a strategic communications and public affairs firm. He is doing three things in a row that most founders only do once: scale the firm, hand off leadership, then sell. Asked on an August call how it was going, he did not give a status update.
His read is that most days and most weeks sit in about the same place, and that what changes is the perspective he is looking from as time goes on. He said the whole thing feels a little like there is no parachute, and that he is glad he is doing it.
Then he stopped describing how it feels and gave two numbers.
The first is his own calendar. About half his time goes to what he calls scaling. He wants that at 85 percent.
The second is his bench. He has five senior leaders, and they are being encouraged to set a target of three times his output for business generation. Once that holds, he can be gone for three weeks, spend the whole time on scaling work, and the firm will not miss him.
Neither number is there yet. Both can be counted each month.
Why it matters to you.
The years before a sale are the only stretch of ownership that seems to have no scoreboard. You have not done it before. Neither has anyone who works for you. So the measure defaults to how the week felt, and a week that felt good is not the same as a firm that got easier to sell. A buyer is not paying for how your year felt. A buyer is paying for how much of the firm runs without you, and you can measure that now, long before anyone makes an offer. Todd picked two stand-ins for it: how much of his time still goes to work only he can do, and how much of that work his senior people can carry. Neither one moves because he had a good Tuesday. Pick the wrong measure and you can spend two busy years and arrive at the sale with the same founder dependency you had at the start. That is the part a buyer takes off the price.
Your one thing.
Name the two numbers that would tell you your firm is more sellable this quarter than it was last quarter. If you cannot name them in five minutes, that is the finding.
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