Skip to main content

Exit planning for UK business owners

Planning to retire, step back or hand over your business?

The decisions you make in the years before an exit can materially affect the value, saleability and options available to you. We help established owners prepare for succession, ownership transition and eventual sale.

Start Your Exit Plan Check Your Exit Readiness

Your business exit journey

  1. Today

    Where the business stands now

  2. Prepare

    Objectives, timing, value

  3. Strengthen

    Management, records, revenue

  4. Choose

    Sale, succession, MBO or EOT

  5. Exit

    An orderly transition

1–5 years

The window in which planning has the greatest effect on your exit. Typically supporting owners of businesses with £1m–£25m turnover or approximately 25–500 employees.

When are you planning to exit?

The ideal window to strengthen management, document processes and demonstrate consistent performance that supports value.

Start Your Exit Plan

Build your personalised Exit Timeline

Answer a short set of questions about your business and your plans, and receive a staged timeline showing what to work on — and when — between now and your exit.

Build Your Exit Timeline

  1. 5+ years

    Grow profit and resilience

  2. 36–60 months

    Reduce owner dependency

  3. 24–36 months

    Document processes

  4. 12–24 months

    Indicative valuation

  5. 6–12 months

    Adviser selection

  6. Exit process

    Route-specific focus

Stage structure used by the Exit Timeline. Your own timeline starts from your stated timeframe.

One journey, more routes than a straightforward sale.

Every owner's exit moves through the same broad stages — where you are determines what to do next.

Explore Your Options
You

What makes a business exit-ready?

  1. 01

    Financial performance

    Consistent, well-reported profits that a buyer can rely on.

  2. 02

    Management

    A second tier able to run the business without the owner.

  3. 03

    Customers

    A spread of customers with recurring or contracted revenue.

  4. 04

    Systems

    Documented processes, reliable reporting and modern systems.

  5. 05

    Owner independence

    Relationships, knowledge and decisions not concentrated in you.

  6. 06

    Transferability

    Clean legal, property and contractual position for a new owner.

Exit planning begins long before the sale.

Owners who begin early have more routes open to them, more negotiating leverage and more time to address the issues buyers discount for. Those who wait often find their options narrowed by circumstance — health, fatigue or an unsolicited offer.

Exit planning is not the same as selling. It is the work of making the business valuable and transferable, and making sure your personal and financial goals are clear.

Read the exit planning guide
Business owner reflecting in his engineering workshop

Is the business dependent on you?

Owner dependence is one of the issues buyers and successors most commonly examine, and it can affect deal structure and handover. If several of these apply, it may be worth addressing well before an exit.

  • Key customers expect to deal with you personally
  • Pricing and major decisions require your sign-off
  • Critical knowledge lives in your head, not in systems
  • The business struggles when you take a fortnight off
  • No one is ready to step into your role
Check Your Owner Dependency

Owner at the centre

Business runs as a network

How exit-ready is your business today?

Answer 24 questions in around eight minutes and receive an overall Exit Readiness Score with category scores and commentary on where to focus.

Check Your Exit Readiness

Also free: the Owner Dependency Score and the Exit Timeline. See all free tools →

  1. 01Financial ReadinessHow consistent, reliable and well reported the company's profits are.
  2. 02Management ReadinessWhether a capable team can lead the business and make decisions without the owner.
  3. 03Owner IndependenceHow far the business relies on the owner for relationships, knowledge and day-to-day decisions.
  4. 04Commercial ResilienceExposure to customer, supplier and key-person concentration, and the quality of revenue.
  5. 05Transaction ReadinessWhether contracts, premises, records and shareholder alignment would support a transfer.

Where are you starting from?

I want to retire in the next few years

Understand how much you need, what the business may realistically be worth and how to close the gap.

My children don't want the business

Explore management buyouts, employee ownership and trade sale as alternatives to family succession.

I want to step back but not sell yet

Build a management team, introduce board reporting and retain equity while reducing your involvement.

I've had an approach from a buyer

Assess whether you are ready, what the offer really means and whether to run a wider process.

Guidance and insights

Written for owners, from experience.

Articles

Practical guidance on every stage of the journey

Plain-English articles on retirement, succession, preparing for sale, value and owner dependence.

Browse the articles

Annual report

The 2026 Exit Planning Report

Our annual view of the exit landscape for UK owner-managed businesses.

Read the report

For professional advisers

Supporting clients approaching an exit?

Resources and a discreet referral route for accountants, wealth advisers, solicitors and business coaches.

Adviser hub

Experience

150+

SME business sales personally completed by Tony Vaughan, who writes and reviews the guidance on this site, drawing on around 30 years of commercial experience.

Confidential consultation

The earlier you plan, the more options you keep.

A discreet, no-obligation conversation about your plans, your timing and what would make the business more transferable.

Your enquiry is confidential. It is reviewed by authorised and experienced exit advisers.

Request a Confidential Review