Before a buyer ever sees the CIM, they’ve looked the company up.
Probably more than once.
They’ve been on the website. Scrolled the owner’s LinkedIn. Read a few reviews. Maybe asked an AI tool what the company does and who it competes with.
None of that shows up in the data room. But it’s already shaping how they read everything that does.
I spend most of my time looking at how businesses show up from the outside. And with owner-led companies heading toward a transition, I keep running into the same thing.
The business is better than it looks.
The buyer needs a reason
Something caught my attention this month. Sycamore bought Walgreens about a year ago, and just sold Boots for $8.9 billion to a family holding company that wanted it for its own reasons. Fast, and to a buyer who already understood why the asset mattered to them.
The exits that seem to be working right now look a lot like that. A strategic. A family. Someone with a specific reason the business is worth more to them than to anyone else.
Which raises a question I don’t hear asked very often.
Can that buyer actually see the reason?
Because most of the time, it lives in the owner’s head.
Owner dependency shows up on the outside too
This community talks a lot about owner dependency. The decisions, relationships and know-how that still run through one person. That work matters.
But there’s a version of it most plans miss.
The brand is often dependent on the owner too.
The website sounds like the founder wrote it ten years ago. Because they did. The testimonials mention the owner by name. The company LinkedIn page is quiet while the owner’s personal profile carries the whole reputation. And the story of why customers stay lives in sales conversations the owner still runs himself.
So when a buyer looks at the company from the outside, they’re really looking at a person.
And they’re already wondering what happens when that person leaves.
Why this belongs earlier in the plan
There was a working paper out of the National Bureau of Economic Research this fall that I found really interesting. The researchers looked at how private equity firms report on their portfolio companies. Early in a deal, the written commentary predicted how things turned out better than the reported numbers did.
I’d take that a step further.
The words around a business tell people something the numbers can’t. Buyers feel that, whether they’d describe it that way or not.
And by the time a company is in market, the read has already been formed. The website, the messaging, the reviews, how leadership talks about the business… it’s all out there before anyone sits down at the table.
So I think this belongs in the exit plan. Early. Right next to the financial cleanup and the transferability work, instead of a marketing scramble in the last ninety days.
A 20-minute check to run with any client
You don’t need an agency to start. Sit down with your client, pull the company up the way a buyer would, and walk through a few questions together.
- Search the company name. Is what comes up first what you’d want a buyer to see?
- Read the homepage out loud. Could a stranger tell what the company does and why customers stay?
- Count how often the owner’s name shows up across the site, reviews and press. Then count the other leaders. That ratio says a lot.
- Look at the reviews. Are people praising the company, or one person?
- Ask ChatGPT or a similar tool what the company does and who it competes with. See if it gets it right. More buyers are doing exactly this.
- Ask the owner why their best customer chose them. Then check whether that reason appears anywhere public.
That last one is the big one. Usually it doesn’t appear anywhere.
If the reason someone would pay a premium isn’t visible from the outside, the buyer fills in the gap themselves. And they rarely fill it in generously.
What to do with what you find
Most of the time this doesn’t call for a rebrand.
Sometimes it’s a tighter story and a few updated pages. Sometimes it’s getting a second leader visible. Sometimes the answer is nothing yet, and that’s useful to know too.
The point is to know before the buyer does.
Sometimes the business is not the problem. The perception is.
Doug Belding is the founder of DLB Creative in Nashville. He helps owner-led companies, PE firms and their advisors see how a business reads from the outside, before it matters most.
Source: Lerner, Paine and Schoar, “Communicating Performance: Textual and Financial Disclosures in Private Equity,” NBER Working Paper 35860, nber.org/papers/w35860
