Buyers have a price for the business owner's curse. They take it off the offer, when they'll buy at all. The numbers are stark. In its 2023 survey of 1,162 US business owners, the Exit Planning Institute found 75% would like to exit within ten years, and it reckons the business is typically 80% or more of the owner's net worth. That's most of a family's future riding on one sale. And the question a buyer is really asking is whether the business is the owner. Take them out and the machine...

Who in your business can spend £500 without asking you? If the answer is nobody, you don't have a team. You have an audience. I ask owners this because the answer maps the whole business in one number. It tells me how decisions travel, how much initiative is legal, and how many times a day the queue forms at one desk. The usual defence is trust. It's not that I don't trust them, it's just easier to run it past me. But watch what the ambiguity actually does. The diligent ones miss things that...

The most expensive meeting in your business is the one that ends in agreement to keep talking. You know the shape. It opens with the owner thinking aloud. So I've been mulling a few things over this week. Forty minutes later there's been discussion, nodding, a warm sense of progress, and nothing decided. The same issues will be back next week, wearing slightly different clothes, and the week after that. Then one day something shifts. Somebody stops the owner mid-flow and says, what are we...