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Most founders don’t start a company planning to sell it. They start to build something valuable, fix a problem, or prove a point. But exits don’t simply happen; they are built.
The best outcomes - financially, strategically, and emotionally - tend to belong to founders who were exit-ready long before a formal process began.
Exits are opaque - hidden behind NDAs, selective storytelling, and the natural pride of founders. That makes it hard for the next generation to learn from them.
Our Anonymous Exits series with exited founders provided some in-depth case studies for founders to use and apply to their own cases - but each case is so personal and unique to the market (and life) dynamics of the founding team, their investors and their market that taken individually, don't provide deep learnings for founders to apply to their own case.
How To Sell Your Company brings these insights together and plots them within a detailed paper, covering everything from preparation to paperwork, from choosing advisors to managing your team post-exit, from your shared visions to your valuations.
It's a complex topic so we created a two-page summary that occupies the opening couple of pages! The summary covers:
- The 5 determinants of exit outcomes
- What drives valuation
- What kills deals
- Strategic decisions before a process
- Maintaining exit optionality
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We start with some headline data - because it's an opaque topic with limited disclosed information, we focus on making sure the data is directionally accurate, rather than comprehensive. There were 715 exits in Europe in 2025. Looking at learning and work deals, 47% of global deals were done in Europe, a higher portion than in APAC and North America. In the paper, we get underneath this data to better understand the direction of travel.
The wider paper represents a playbook that stands on its own as a best‑practice guide, with interviews and case studies used to validate and occasionally challenge the conventional wisdom.
If you take only one idea from the playbook, it should be this: you do not 'run an exit' once. You build an exit‑ready company continuously, and you selectively choose when to convert that readiness into a transaction.
Beyond maximising price, a good exit protects optionality: it lets founders choose between selling, raising, or continuing independently from a position of strength. The most consistent pattern across successful outcomes is early, disciplined preparation - not because founders are 'building to sell', but because exit-ready companies are simply better-run companies.
This report brings together founder and buyer interviews with a set of recent and illustrative exit case studies. It is written for founders who want to build optionality - the ability to keep building, raise, sell, or partially de-risk - without waiting for a single 'right moment’.
Built with insights from people that have been there and done it:
- James Weatherill, CEO and co-founder at Arbor Education
- Louis Glass, Partner and Global Co-head of Tech M&A at CMS
- Lawrence Chu, Partner and Co-Chair of the Global M&A Group at Goodwin
- James Local, Managing Director at Houlihan Lokey
- Sophie Glanfield, Private Equity Investor, Tenzing
- Phil Ugelow, Head of Corporate Development at Curriculum Associates
- Hannes Aichmayr, Director of Corporate Development at Sdui Group
- Simon Hay, exited co-founder of Firefly Learning
- Matt Johnson, Edtech Investment Banking Lead, Oppenheimer
- Toby Mather, exited founder of Lingumi
- Oliver Musial, private equity investor, former Permira
- Claudio Erba, co-founder at Docebo
- Grant Hayward, Partner, Erevena
- Jonathan Bryant, Partner, Erevena
Read the paper here!
