She had a buyer. She had a deal. She nearly walked away from her retirement.
Not because the offer was bad. Because she needed the number to mean something it was never going to mean.
I worked with her early in my advisory career. She’d built a real business. Had a real buyer at the table. The deal would clearly fund her retirement. But she wouldn’t engage with the financial picture. Her husband handled the finances. They hadn’t worked with a third party to model what she actually needed. So she was operating on instinct and ego instead of numbers.
She had a multiple in her head. Not because she’d calculated what she needed, but because it was the number that felt like validation. The number that said she’d won.
Every time the deal moved – a revised offer, a term adjustment, a timeline shift – she took it personally. She had no compass. Just a scoreboard she’d invented.
The question every owner asks – and why it’s the wrong one
“What’s my business worth?”
It’s the first question almost every owner asks when they start thinking about a sale. It feels logical. It feels responsible. It feels like the right place to start.
It isn’t.
That question hands the definition of success to the market before you’ve defined it yourself. You get an answer – a range, a multiple, a comparable – and suddenly that answer becomes your benchmark. Your goal. Your number.
Except it isn’t your number. It’s the market’s number. And the market doesn’t know what you need.
The right question is this: what does this sale need to do for my life?
That question leads somewhere completely different. It leads to a number that is yours – built on your costs, your timeline, your plans, your obligations. A number you can defend when the deal gets hard, because you know exactly what it represents.
What the Number actually is
The Number is not a price target. It is not a multiple you read in an industry report.
It has two components.
The Floor is what you need the sale to deliver to walk away financially whole. Retirement funded. Debt cleared. Whatever your baseline looks like. Non-negotiable. Calculate it, don’t guess it.
The Target is what would make the sale feel worth everything you put into building the business. This is where motivation lives. If the deal lands here, you feel like you won.
Most owners walk into a sale with neither defined. So they anchor to whatever the buyer puts on the table. Then they spend years wondering if they left money behind – because they never decided what the table was supposed to hold.
What happens when you don’t have it
I’ve seen this pattern more times than I can count. It always goes the same way.
The deal opens well. The owner feels optimistic. Then the buyer revises a term. Or a due diligence issue surfaces. Or the offer comes in slightly below expectations.
And the owner unravels.
Not because the deal is bad. Because they have no independent standard to measure it against. Every move the buyer makes becomes a referendum. Is this a good deal? Is this a fair offer? Should I hold out?
They can’t answer those questions – because they never defined what a good deal looked like for them.
They’re not negotiating. They’re reacting. And buyers know the difference. I’ve watched sellers accept earnouts they never collected, agree to terms they didn’t understand, and close deals they later regretted – not because the buyer was smarter, but because the seller had nothing to negotiate from.
An owner with a defined Number is harder to move. Not more aggressive – just harder to move. They evaluate every offer and every term against something real. They don’t flinch at buyer tactics designed to create urgency or doubt.
That’s leverage. Clarity creates it. Not the strength of the business.
How to find it – before the process starts
The Number is not a gut feeling. It is a calculation. And it requires your advisors.
Your financial advisor models what retirement costs you – not a ballpark, the real number, net of tax and inflation. Your accountant shows you the after-tax proceeds on a range of deal structures. Your exit advisor helps you understand how deal terms affect what you receive. Earnouts, seller notes, escrows, working capital adjustments. All of it changes the number on the other side of closing.
I went into my own sale knowing my Number. I’d learned that lesson years earlier as a corporate attorney, watching sellers navigate deals. I saw what happened to the ones who had it and the ones who didn’t. My Number shifted a little over time. But I always had clarity around it. That clarity told me when the time was right to sell. And when the right deal came, I knew it. Through a process that was genuinely stressful at times, it kept me grounded.
Do this work before you talk to a buyer. Before you engage a banker. Before you do anything.
Once the process starts, the pressure builds fast. Bankers push for decisions. Buyers create timelines. Due diligence is exhausting. The last thing you want to be doing in the middle of all that is trying to figure out what you actually need.
Put a number on paper. Share it with your advisors. Build the deal criteria around it.
That is what separates owners who close with confidence from owners who close with doubt.
Three things to do this week
Call your financial advisor. Ask them to model what the sale proceeds need to be – net of tax, net of fees – for your retirement to be fully funded. That’s your Floor.
Write down what winning looks like. Not the market’s definition. Yours. What dollar amount, what terms, what timeline would make you feel like this sale was worth building the business for? That’s your Target.
Tell your exit advisor both numbers before the process starts. If you don’t have an exit advisor, that’s the first gap to close.
She eventually listened.
Her banker and I kept coming back to the same point. The deal on the table cleared her Floor. It was close to her Target. And when she finally sat down and did the work – really mapped out what she needed – she saw it.
She closed. It was a great outcome by any measure.
She is happily retired.
The Number was always there. She just hadn’t looked at it.
Most owners spend months getting their business ready for a buyer. Very few spend an afternoon getting themselves ready for a sale. That afternoon is the most important work in this entire process. If you want to figure out your Number with someone who has sat on every side of this table, reach out about one-on-one advisory: info@optimusbusinessadvisory.com.
