When I sold the financial planning business I founded, I didn’t take the deal most people expect a founder to take.
I didn’t sell the business, bank a cheque and walk out the door. I deliberately sold to my own team, despite the continued siren calls from consolidators.
At the time that wasn’t the obvious route. It’s rarely the route that gets pitched to you first. But it was the right one because it protected the thing I really cared about, which was not the headline number, but what happened to clients, staff and the name on the door after I’d gone.
I’ve been thinking about that again after reading a piece on wealth management succession structures by an M&A firm I collaborate with.
What struck me wasn’t their focus on just the number, it was how many genuinely different shapes an exit can take. Outright sale. Private equity-backed platform deals. Partial exits with equity rollover. Management buyouts. Phased retirement. Growth capital. Platform partnerships where you keep your autonomy but borrow someone else’s infrastructure. Nine or ten distinct structures, each solving something different and truly bespoke.
Most founders going into their first, and probably only, exit don’t know that menu exists. They assume M&A means one thing. And whichever of the many consolidators and brokers gets to them first tends to shape what they think ‘normal’ looks like.
In my opinion that’s the reason experience matters when you’re choosing who advises you through this. Not because newer entrants to the space are doing anything wrong, as plenty are perfectly capable.
But someone who has only ever sat on one side of the table, whether that’s as a broker, introducer or a buyer’s agent, is naturally only going to be fluent in the structures that serve that side.
Someone who has actually been the seller and the buyer, who has lived the anxiety of handing over a business they built, or who has the discipline of integrating one they’ve acquired, sees the whole context. They know which of those structures actually fits what you want, not just which one closes fastest.
A wrong choice can be costly.
There’s a case study in that same piece that makes the point better than I can. A wealth management business took on a 49% minority investment from a European family office. The relationship didn’t work out the way either side hoped, and they ran a competitive process to find a way out. At least six written offers came in from plcs and PE-backed platforms. The eventual winning bid wasn’t the highest one.
The winning structure gave a new sponsor a significant minority stake, put a structured loan in place for the management team to take the balance of the family office stake, and left the founder holding their original majority to deal with.
The owner got their exit at a strong multiple and walked away satisfied. The management team, who’d effectively begun running the business anyway, ended up fully aligned with both the sponsor and the founder, with a long-term incentive plan built in and a clear line to a guaranteed valuation and exit at a pre-agreed time.
Although the deal achieved a strong market valuation, all stakeholders accepted that was not the primary driver for the decision.
Everybody got the structure that actually worked for what they needed next. That’s not a story about price, but reflects someone at the table who understood there was more than one way to solve the problem.
If you’re a founder starting to think about your own exit, the question worth asking whoever you’re talking to isn’t: “How many years have you been doing this?” It’s closer to: “How many of these structures have you actually closed, on both sides of the table?”
That answer will tell you far more about whether they’re going to protect what you built, or just get the deal done. I know which one I needed when it was my turn.
Lee Robertson is an editorial consultant, non-executive director and founder of Unplugged Strategies
