Know What Buyers Will See — Before You Talk to One.
Exit Desk is a Buyer-Lens Audit™ — a buyer-side veteran's read on your business: the diligence findings, the discounts, and the walk-away triggers. Before any of it costs you. Not brokers. Not AI chatbots. 25 years and 75+ transactions of M&A judgment — including the Rolling Stone and Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve acquisitions — applied to your specific situation.
I've sat on the buy side of acquisitions, divestitures, and portfolio exits — across deals from $500K to over $2B in media, healthcare services, retail, and technology. At Penske Media, I led the acquisitions of Rolling Stone and Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. Earlier, I led the divestiture of Express at L Brands and the build-out of Long Beach Surgical Center at Surgical Care Affiliates. Before that, I worked across the Intel Capital portfolio. I know exactly what we look for, what we discount, and what we walk away from. Now I'm telling sellers.
Selling your business isn't a moment — it's a 1–5 year journey. Different professionals serve different parts of that journey. Exit Desk fills the gap before brokers, advisors, and bankers come into play.
The Buyer-Lens Audit™ is the resource you need 3 years before the broker — the read that tells you what to fix while you still have time to fix it. Many of our partner brokers, CPAs, and wealth advisors refer clients to Exit Desk during the preparation window, then re-engage them when the business is ready to go to market.
Unfamiliar with the vocabulary? The Exit Desk glossary covers what each of these terms means in a real buyer's diligence room.
Apex Landscape Group is a DFW-based commercial landscaping platform generating $3M–$7M in revenue with $1M–$2M in EBITDA across 85 recurring commercial accounts. Retention is above 90% over six years, no single customer exceeds 10% of revenue, and the founder has already stepped back from daily operations — the business runs without him.
Two regional roll-up platforms have already called unsolicited. This is a clean-looking tuck-in candidate for a landscape services consolidator, and the profile will generate immediate interest if properly positioned — the open questions are earnings quality, key-man concentration in the ops manager, and whether the proprietary scheduling system is actually defensible or just a well-organized spreadsheet.
The Buyer-Lens Audit™ fits the 1–5 year window before you engage a broker, M&A advisor, or investment banker — when the right question is not "what is my business worth today" but "what would a buyer see, and what can I change now."
Pricing scales to your deal size: $199 for businesses under $1M in revenue (where the buyer universe is primarily individual SBA buyers), $499 for $1M+ (where institutional buyers run real diligence). At either price point, a single insight about owner dependency, customer concentration, or earnings quality — the kinds of issues that routinely compress valuations by 20–40% — is worth many multiples of the fee.
One report. No subscription. No upsell. No commission. Just the PDF in your inbox.
Most professionals serving business-owner clients don't have a buyer-side resource to point them toward when they're thinking about an eventual sale. Exit Desk fills that gap — without competing for the engagement that comes when they're ready to transact.
Brokers and M&A advisors: The audit serves the window before your representation begins. When a client isn't ready to go to market yet, we tell them what to fix. When they are ready, we refer them back to partner brokers in our network. Two-way referrals — pre-qualified seller leads when the business is ready, paid placement for clients you can't represent yet.
CPAs, attorneys, and wealth advisors: The Buyer-Lens Audit™ is built to be referred — not white-labeled, not commission-based, not in conflict with your engagement. Your clients get an independent buyer-side read; you stay the trusted advisor in their corner. $100 per converted referral. No minimums, no exclusivity.
Learn About the Partner Program →Most owners take this audit thinking they're "pretty ready." Most aren't. The 8 questions take 2 minutes.