If selling your business is the biggest financial decision you ever have to make, you want to get it right.
To help you do that we have enlisted the help of a fine collection of entrepreneurs who have exited (plus a couple of  expert advisers), asking them to tell us something they wish they’d known about or put more effort into beforehand.

So read on to discover the surprises that may lie in wait, or learn from common sense picked up by the people who have experienced it all first hand.
You need to plan your exit early
Who says: Lara Morgan, founder of Company Shortcuts. She sold toiletries business Pacific Direct in 2008 for £20m after 18 years

Start thinking about it from at least two years out to maximise the value. Step back from the business and dispassionately consider who the likely buyers are, giving detailed consideration to the things they will see of value in your company. These are the assets you should focus on strengthening and securing to avoid value leaking away.

Get a due diligence checklist from any leading accountancy firm so you understand the process when you sell. Get all the dull paperwork in order (you could even consider organising it all in a cloud data room), so you can focus all your energy on the deal, the buyers and the legalities. This will be time well worth investing.

When you are selling, ensure your company continues to perform without you or your price will not hold up. It may go against every instinct you have as someone who has built your own business, but you need to step back at this point and ensure you have a great management team and succession planning in place. And if you expect to leave after the sale, bolt your best people to the floor.
The idea of it makes your business stronger
Who says: Mayank Patel, founder of Currencies Direct, which is part of the Azibo Group of businesses and has offices across five continents

You should always have an exit strategy in mind, because it means that you continue to better your business all the time, irrespective of whether you sell or not. No one buys a house and lets it become run down.

I had offers to sell in 1998, 2003 and 2006, but they’ve got to tick all the boxes. My success cannot be to the detriment of something else. You sometimes get very opportunistic deals and if you have a great business, people will find you. It’s important to be a business that people like, customers talk about fondly, and where the rate of referral is high. That in itself creates more attention.
The path to it can surprise you
Who says: Glenn Hyams, co-founder and director of BTC Activewear, which was acquired by German company Falk & Ross in 2010

I started my business in 1989 with two partners, including my uncle as a silent partner. We put in £15,000 each and owned a third of the company distributing Fruit of the Loom products in the UK and Ireland.

In 1999, we’d grown to a £9m turnover by adding additional corporate, promotions and workwear brands, but I’d had enough and was disillusioned with the way the business was going. One of us had to buy the other out. My uncle came over from the US to mediate and he and I agreed to sell our combined shares for £20,000 to my partner, even though the business was valued at £500,000. My partner then changed his mind, partly because licensees I had a good relationship with accounted for 50% to 60% of our revenues. He knew they wouldn’t work with him. In the end, we paid him £200,000 and I asked the three licensees to stump up for my partner’s shares.

In return I gave them a 25% stake each in the parent company, with my share split 50/50 with my uncle. In 2006, with turnover at £16.5m, one partner left to set up on his own and Charles Grose, Steve Pope and I decided to wrap the business up into one company with a central distribution centre. I also bought my uncle’s shares.

In 2009, we moved to a modern 106,000 square foot distribution centre. Soon after we were approached to sell the business. BTC Activewear now has a turnover of £35m and this year 70% of the equity was acquired by the pan-European German distribution business Falk & Ross on behalf of its parent company Steadfast. I and my two partners retain 10% each. I’m 57 and the plan is for the parent company to be flipped in the next few years, but I may stay involved. I started in a little office and still pinch myself that I’m a joint director of a company of this size.
Remember they are buying out your plan
Who says: Ben White, co-founder of Notion Capital and a serial entrepreneur. With brother Jos, he founded RBR Networks, Star Internet, MessageLabs and Notion Capital. In 2008, MessageLabs was sold to Symantec for $700m

The first time round with RBR Networks, when we were just a small team, we went into the meeting and I drew all the information on a flip chart. Although this approach eventually paid off, the exit process had such a steep learning curve that, as a result, it wasn’t ever clear to us whether we had sold for a good price or a bad one. Only with hindsight did we realise that with a detailed plan with key performance indicators and business drivers built in, we would have been able to value the business. Without one we could never truly value any company we had.

So when we were making moves to exit from our next business, which was much bigger, employing hundreds of people across multiple offices, we knew
that the flip-chart approach wouldn’t be sufficient and that a plan was crucial.

So what do you include in your exit plan? We could have just put forward a set of monthly finances, but having outside investors really helped us to think long term and analyse the market size and growth against our own growth projections. Any short-term forecasts should be very cautious. Even then, the acquirers asked us to come back with more information. It did mean that they were very interested though. If we had gone in with just a set of monthly finances, we wouldn’t have been able to convince them in those initial meetings that our growth plan was realistic – and they would probably have walked away.