GrowthForge: Field Notes #13

In 2018 I interviewed a founder who had been in business for twenty-eight years and had never written down an exit plan. When I asked him why, he said: “I’ve been meaning to get to it.” He said it without irony. Then he laughed, because he heard himself say it, and we both knew what the laugh meant.

The Greeks had a word for this. Akrasia. Acting against your own best interest. Aristotle wrote about it in the Nicomachean Ethics — the weakness of will that lets you know exactly what you should do and not do it. Most founders I have worked with since then have some form of akrasia on their exit. The ones who are honest admit it. The ones who are not call it something else. Prioritisation. Bandwidth. Timing. The quarter. The year. The cycle.

I spent six months on that research. Ninety business owners completed the survey. Eight sat for a long interview. Only three in ten had a formal exit plan in place. The ones who did were not mostly the ones with the most money, or the most staff, or the most years of runway. That was the surprise. It was the finding that sent me down the rabbit hole of what this report eventually became.

Here is what the research found. The reasons founders do not have an exit plan are not economic. They are structural, and they sit in four places. A founder without an exit plan almost always has a story in one of these four registers. Trust, that the successor is not ready. Personal resources, that leaving would mean losing what the business has become. Identity, that an exit would be an exit from the self as much as from the firm. Unconscious incompetence, the quieter one, where the founder simply does not know what they do not know, because they have never done it before.

All four sit below the waterline of how most advisors work with founder-entrepreneurs. Most advisors work on the financial plan, the valuation, the tax structure, the succession document. That work is necessary. But if it is the only work, it does not land. I watched this in the interviews. The founders with the cleanest finances and the best advisors were often the ones furthest from actually exiting. They had the infrastructure for an exit and not the inclination. That gap is where the akrasia lives.

What I learned — and what I now teach through GrowthForge™ — is that becoming exit-ready is the same work as becoming transferable. A business that does not depend on its founder is, by definition, a business the founder can leave. The four engines are the four places this dependency lives. Stability holds the operating truth. Execution holds the throughput. 

Tempered Together™ holds the culture and the trust. TurboForge™ holds the strategic direction. Fix each one in sequence and the akrasia dissolves, because the thing keeping the founder in the room — the sense that it will all fall apart without them — is no longer the reality.

You do not exit a business by writing an exit plan. You exit by building a business that can run without you, and then noticing that you have done it.

If any of that sounds like your business, the honest first step is the Diagnostic. 

Twenty-five questions, ten minutes, a report that names which engine is carrying the most weight right now. Not a sales call. A starting point. If you have been meaning to get to it for a while, that is the note you needed to write yourself.

Start here: