The best deals we see share one trait, and it isn’t size, market, or timing. It’s that the owner started preparing about two years before anyone signed anything. The worst deals share the opposite trait: the sale process and the preparation happened simultaneously, which means the buyer priced every unfixed problem at the moment of maximum leverage, theirs.
So if you read about exits while telling yourself you’re not ready, you’re in the strongest position an owner can occupy. Two years out, everything is still fixable, and the fixes are worth multiples of what any negotiation tactic will ever earn you. Here’s what a deliberate 24 months actually changes.
Why the same business sells for more after preparation
Recall the drivers from what an MSP is actually worth: revenue mix, client concentration, owner dependence, contract quality, and clean books. Every one of them responds to deliberate effort, and every one of them is slow. That slowness is the whole argument for starting early. You cannot fix client concentration in a quarter, and you cannot build a management layer during diligence. The owner who starts at minus-24 months gets to sell a different company than the one they run today. The owner who starts at minus-90 days sells the company as-is, with a discount for every item on the list.
The compounding is real. Take a shop doing $500k of adjusted EBITDA that would price around 4x today because of a soft revenue mix and heavy owner dependence. Two years of work that lifts EBITDA to $600k and fixes the risk factors adds more than $100k times the multiple. It moves the multiple itself, because the risks that held it at 4x are gone. At 5x on $600k, the price went from $2M to $3M. Almost nothing else an owner can do with two years pays like that.
The 24-month arc, roughly in order
Months 1 to 6: get the numbers true. Clean books, consistent revenue recognition, personal expenses separated and documented, addbacks tracked with receipts as they happen instead of reconstructed later. Then compute your own SDE, EBITDA, and strict MRR percentage so every later decision has a baseline. This phase is unglamorous bookkeeping and it de-risks everything that follows, because your next two year-ends become your diligence exhibits.
Months 4 to 15: fix the revenue. Paper the handshake clients onto assignable agreements, convert the T&M regulars to contracts, attach security and backup services to the base, and reprice the legacy clients who haven’t seen an increase since 2019. Recurring revenue out-values project revenue dollar for dollar, and this is the window where the mix actually moves. If one client is over 20% of revenue, this is also when you grow around them, because concentration is the slowest fix on the board.
Months 9 to 20: fire yourself from the org chart. Whatever only you can do is a discount waiting to be applied. Promote or hire the service manager, hand off the client relationships you’ve been hoarding (they’ll survive, and it’s better for them too), document the tribal knowledge, and get out of the escalation path. The test is a three-week vacation with your phone off. When the business passes it, a buyer can believe the earnings survive your exit, and that belief is worth a good part of a turn on the multiple.
Months 18 to 24: run the dress rehearsal. Assemble the data room before anyone asks, review your own contracts for assignability landmines, brief your CPA, and get a real read on value from someone who prices these businesses, so your expectations and the market meet before the process starts rather than during it.
What this has to do with us
Vicinity buys MSPs, and a fair question is why a buyer publishes the playbook that raises sellers’ prices. The answer is that we’d rather buy prepared companies at fair prices than unprepared ones at discounts, because we operate what we buy, and the problems a discount pays for at closing still have to be fixed afterward, by us, at full cost. A seller who spent two years getting the business clean has done work we’d otherwise do post-close. Paying for that work is a trade we like.
So we built a practice around the runway: a baseline valuation of where you stand today, an honest gap plan across the drivers above, and quarterly working sessions toward an exit at maximum value, whether or not that exit is with us. That last clause is load-bearing and it’s in writing when we engage. An owner who does this work ends up with a better business and more options, and owners with options make good sellers and good neighbors either way. The details live on our not ready yet page.
The one mistake to avoid
Don’t wait for readiness to arrive on its own, because what arrives on its own is the other thing: the health event, the anchor client’s RFP, the burnout year that shows up in the numbers. Unplanned exits price at a discount, always, and the difference between selling on your schedule and selling on the world’s schedule is usually measured in six figures.
Two years from now you’ll either own a more valuable company with a plan, or the same company with less runway. The first hour of the work is a conversation about where you stand, it’s free, and “I’m not ready to sell” is the best possible way to open it.