The exit-readiness platform
for owner-led businesses.
Fix the business. Fund the retirement.
Most owners hold 80–90% of their wealth in a business they have never valued, de-risked, or made sellable.
Exit OS
A generation of owners is about to sell, all at once.
The founders who built the last forty years of Main Street are retiring together. Most have never sold a business, and most of what they are worth is locked inside one.
in privately held business value is set to change hands this decade as owners over 60 retire, the "silver tsunami."
of a typical owner's net worth is tied up in the business, not in liquid savings they can retire on.
of businesses that go to market never sell, or sell for far less than the owner needs, most often for reasons that were fixable years earlier.
Industry estimates (Exit Planning Institute and others); figures are directional. The wealth is real. The plan, usually, is not.
The owner is usually the last to know.
A founder spends thirty years building a company, then meets a buyer for the first time at the worst possible moment: when it is time to sell. The buyer arrives with a diligence checklist, a discount for every risk, and far more information than the seller ever gathered about their own business.
By then the price is set by what the seller cannot answer. The gap between what the business could be worth and what it actually fetches is enormous, and almost entirely avoidable with a few years of runway.
No credible number, so hope fills the gap. Reality lands during diligence.
If the business is the owner, a buyer is renting a person, not buying an asset.
Documents scattered across drives and inboxes read as risk, and price like it.
Not a listing site. Not a course. An operating system.
A defensible, three-method valuation grounded in real sector data, not a broker's flattering guess. The owner sees the number and exactly how it was built.
A readiness diagnostic that scores the business the way three different buyer types actually see it, then names the specific things they would discount.
Each risk becomes a tracked action with success criteria, evidence, and the buyer types it wins over. Improvement you can prove, not advice you file away.
The through-line: fix the business, fund the retirement. Every screen ladders up to that one sentence.
Meet the cast.
Everything from here is told through two fictional people. They map to the product's two audiences.
Elena Vásquez Owner
Summit Mechanical Services — a commercial HVAC & mechanical contractor in Reno, NV. Founded 2004, 42 employees, sole owner.
- $8.4M revenue, $1.65M adjusted EBITDA (FY2025)
- Wants to retire in about 3 years
- Roughly 73% of her net worth is trapped in the business
- She still leads every major bid and owns the top account, a hospital system at 34% of revenue
Marcus Chen, CPA Advisor
Anchor Ridge Advisory — a boutique CPA firm. Runs every engagement inside Exit OSx on his own branded portal.
- A roster of owner-clients, Summit among them
- Works inside each client's workspace, not around it
- Reports carry his firm's brand: "Anchor Ridge · powered by Exit OSx"
- His job: turn the diagnostic into a plan and the plan into a closed deal
Five steps, run on repeat.
The whole product is one loop. Everything an owner or advisor does lives on it.
Value
Establish what the business is worth today, three ways.
→Diagnose
Score readiness through three buyers' eyes; surface what they discount.
→Close the gap
Work each risk as a tracked action with evidence.
→Prove it
Organize the data room a buyer expects; attach the proof.
→Report
Generate advisor-grade PDFs. Re-value. Watch the number move.
Re-value at the end, and the loop starts again at a higher number. That is the entire point.
The Value Gap: the number worth chasing.
Summit is worth about $6.5M in equity today, risk-adjusted. Close the owner-dependency and concentration risks over three years and a buyer would pay closer to $9.0M. That spread is not luck. It is a work list.
risk-adjusted
risks closed
is what Elena can create, not by selling harder, but by closing the risks a buyer prices in. Owner dependency and single-customer concentration may not feel like risks to her, she runs the business every day. A buyer sees the same facts through a different lens: what is routine to the owner reads as fragility to the acquirer, and they discount for it. That difference in perception is the gap.
Same loop, two seats.
The owner and the advisor run the identical loop. What differs is the vantage point and a handful of powers.
Elena's journey User
Onboards herself or is invited by Marcus
Seven questions and ninety seconds gives a first valuation.
Lives on the dashboard
Value today, the top move, the walk-away math, all in one place.
Works her own actions
Checks off sub-steps, attaches evidence, re-values.
Marcus's journey Advisor
Opens the portfolio
Every client's score, activity, and trend on one roster.
"Acts as" a client
Steps into Summit's workspace to do the work, every edit logged.
Delivers branded reports
His firm's PDFs, plus advisor-only strategy work Elena cannot self-serve.
Inside the app
as Elena, the owner.
The next seven screens are the surfaces an owner actually uses, annotated. This is the product running the loop, screen by screen.
"What is it worth, and what is the one move?"
Value first, always. The single number an owner cares about leads the screen, with its range and how fresh it is.
One top move. Not a backlog of forty. The highest-leverage action, and which buyers it wins over.
Value to pocket. Enterprise value becomes equity becomes the retirement question, in three numbers.
Three methods triangulate one honest number.
Three methods, not one. Each carries a data-quality badge and a weight. The blend is honest about what it does and does not know.
Diligence, pre-empted. The sanity panel flags what a buyer would question, before a buyer ever sees it.
To your pocket. The waterfall walks enterprise value down through debt, costs, and tax to the number that actually funds retirement.
Every valuation stands on normalized earnings.
The engine does not value stated profit. It rebuilds a defensible EBITDA first. Here is Summit's three-year P&L and the add-back bridge behind the $1.65M the multiple runs on.
| $ thousands | FY2023 | FY2024 | FY2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | 6,900 | 7,620 | 8,400 |
| Cost of services | (4,347) | (4,738) | (5,208) |
| Gross profit | 2,553 | 2,882 | 3,192 |
| Gross margin | 37.0% | 37.8% | 38.0% |
| Operating expenses | (1,782) | (1,946) | (2,100) |
| Operating income | 771 | 936 | 1,092 |
| Depreciation & amort. | 150 | 165 | 180 |
| Reported EBITDA | 921 | 1,101 | 1,272 |
| Reported EBITDA | 1,272 |
| + Owner comp above market | 250 |
| + Personal vehicles & travel | 38 |
| + One-time litigation settlement | 60 |
| + Above-market related-party rent | 30 |
| Normalized EBITDA | 1,650 |
$1.65M normalized × 4.9× sector multiple = the $8.1M EBITDA-Multiple method on the last screen. Every add-back is credited by how defensible it is to a buyer.
The same business reads differently to different buyers.
| Strategiccompetitor | PE5–7yr hold | Search Fundoperator | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Believablenumbers + story | 72 Mixed | 68 Mixed | 60 Mixed |
| Transferablesurvives owner | 38 At risk | 30 At risk | 28 At risk |
| Durablepredictable cash | 46 At risk | 42 At risk | 40 At risk |
| Market Positionmoat + pricing | 64 Mixed | 58 Mixed | 62 Mixed |
| Overall | 58 | 52 | 47 |
Elena still owns the top account and leads every major bid. A buyer reads this as: the business is the owner. Expect an earnout or a long transition tied to her staying.
Three buyers, side by side. No single vanity score. Strategic, PE, and Search Fund each score the same four dimensions, because they price risk differently.
Clusters tell the story. One weak answer is survivable. Two reds in a dimension become a narrative a buyer acts on, written in their language.
A separate Owner Readiness track scores Elena herself: Financial 75, Emotional 100, Process 50, Life After 50.
"Does the sale actually fund my retirement?"
Wealth not counted: primary-residence equity ($1.2M) is excluded, you still need somewhere to live. Home is wealth, not retirement coverage.
Everything she has. Net worth (home excluded) plus what the business would actually net after fees and tax.
A defensible number to hit. Annual lifestyle cost times years to fund. Simple on purpose, and hard to argue with.
The tie-in. Closing the ~$2.5M Value Gap adds roughly $1.7M after tax, and flips this shortfall into a surplus. Fix the business, fund the retirement.
Upload anything. It files itself.
One live number. Data-room completeness, so an owner always knows how buyer-ready their paperwork is.
Eight folders, A to H. The taxonomy a buyer's diligence follows: financials, personal, tax, estate, insurance, real estate, advisors, and a catch-all.
Auto-sorted. Drop a PDF and it is filed automatically against a 45-item checklist. Each item reads Received, To follow, or Outstanding.
Every risk becomes a tracked, provable action.
Born from the diagnostic. Each red signal auto-spawns the action that fixes it, tagged with the buyers it wins over.
Success criteria, not vibes. Pre-authored sub-steps define what "done" means. Progress is a real fraction.
Evidence attached. Proof lives on the action and flows into the data room. Delegation sends a scoped portal link.
Advisor-grade PDFs, generated from live data.
3 of 3 methods
Nine deterministic reports, all traced to the same frozen data, so the valuation report and the wellness roll-up can never disagree. When an advisor is attached, the header wears their brand.
AI is coming for the compliance work. Not for the trust.
The deterministic side of an accounting practice, returns, bookkeeping, reconciliations, is being automated and commoditized. The relationship, and the judgment an owner leans on for the biggest decision of their life, is not.
Compliance is commoditizing
As software absorbs the routine work, the fees attached to it compress. Competing on "we file it faster" is a race to the bottom.
Trust does not commoditize
Owners already trust their CPA with the numbers. That standing is the one thing a competitor, or an algorithm, cannot copy, and it is exactly what an exit demands.
A high-margin advisory line
Exit readiness becomes a productized service that deepens the relationship and adds profit, with the software doing the deterministic work, so it takes little added labor or headcount.
The advisor's move. Keep an owner from becoming the 80% statistic, and turn the highest-stakes moment of their career into the most valuable relationship in your book, without hiring to do it.
Inside the app
as Marcus, the advisor.
The advisor runs the same loop across a whole roster. Four screens: the portfolio, acting as a client, branded reporting and billing, and the high-value advisory work that is his to own.
Every client on one roster.
Three pills per client. Activity, assessment cadence, and score trend. A stale or sliding client is visible at a glance.
Seats, not guesswork. Advisor-sponsored clients are billed seats. Internal client teammates are free.
His own portal. The whole thing lives at anchorridge.exitosx.com under his firm's brand.
He does the work inside her workspace.
Strategic buyers credit normalizations most readily; PE underwrites most conservatively.
The amber banner never hides. "Marcus Chen is editing as Summit Mechanical Services." Every write is tagged advisor_edit with a stated reason.
Advisor-depth tools. He can see how each buyer type would credit the EBITDA, and tune the valuation blend, things the owner view keeps simpler.
Guardrails by attribution, not walls. He can edit the financials, the diagnostic, even the personal statement, nothing is off-limits. But every change is logged to him with a reason, and Elena sees a full activity log and can revert his edits.
The brand his clients see. The bill he owns.
A 7-digit handshake. The client connects by entering the advisor's ID; the advisor approves. Or the advisor invites the client by email. Consent runs both ways.
White-labeled where it counts. The client's workspace and every report wear his firm's name, logo, color, and subdomain. To the client it feels like the advisor's own software; this back-office console stays Exit OSx.
Billing is side-aware. When the advisor sponsors a client, the advisor pays and the owner cannot touch billing. Release a client and it cleanly reverts to them.
The software does the deterministic work. The advisor does the judgment.
The nine self-serve reports are arithmetic and rules, no opinion required. A second tier, on the roadmap, will be gated behind the advisor on purpose.
What the owner runs alone
Valuation, diagnostic, walk-away math, the data room, and nine deterministic reports. All traceable to a fact or an engine output.
Strategy the advisor will unlock
A planned second tier: tax strategy, estate & wealth transfer, insurance, and continuity, drafted from the client's own data for the advisor to review, edit, and approve before any owner sees it.
The model never does the math
Every number in every report traces to a fact, a snapshot, or an engine. The AI writes the narrative; it never invents a figure.
The division of labor. Exit OSx makes an owner ready and an advisor efficient. The platform handles what should be deterministic; the advisor is freed to do what actually requires a human, structuring the deal, the estate, and the life after it.
One loop, two seats, one sentence.
Value the business honestly. See it through three buyers' eyes. Turn every risk into a provable action. Organize the room a buyer expects. Report it, re-value, and watch the number climb, until the sale funds the life.
A $0.35M shortfall today becomes a comfortable surplus, by creating $2.5M of value she controls.
A branded portal that makes every client ready and every engagement efficient, so his time goes to judgment, not spreadsheets.
- EBITDA
- Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, amortization. A proxy for operating cash flow.
- Normalized EBITDA
- EBITDA after adding back owner-specific and one-time costs a new owner would not carry.
- Enterprise vs equity value
- Enterprise value is the whole business; equity value is what is left for the owner after net debt.
- Value Gap
- The spread between equity today and buyer-ready equity, the improvement opportunity.
- Walk-Away Gap
- Whether sale proceeds plus assets fund the owner's retirement number.
- Data room
- The organized document set (folders A–H) a buyer's diligence works through.
- Acting-as
- An advisor operating inside a client's workspace, every edit logged and reversible.
- CPA
- Certified Public Accountant, the credential Marcus holds.
- WACC
- Weighted average cost of capital, the discount rate the DCF applies to future cash flow.
- FCF
- Free cash flow, the cash a business generates after operating costs and reinvestment.
Fix the business. Fund the retirement.