This week I passed the CEPA* exam. Certified Exit Planning Advisor. The name doesn't tell you much on its own, so here's what it means.
Exit planning is a framework for getting a business owner ready to sell, hand off, or step back from their business, years before they actually do it. It includes aspects of personal financial readiness, the sort that I picked up from years of reading Financial Independence and similar subjects. It includes aspects of personal mental readiness, like shaping a concrete vision of what it looks like after the transition, which is something I've become intimately familiar with this past year following the abrupt and illegal closure of USAID. And, of course, it helps me look at a business the way a buyer or a successor would, find the things that quietly drag its value down or make it hard to leave. This is probably the part I'm most comfortable doing, as it's a version of what I did every time I changed posts. You inherit a system that may be flawed (the whole thing runs on the owner/your predecessor's inherent knowledge, the books/Google Drive are a mess, one client/activity is half the revenue/portfolio, and nothing's written down (universal)), and help fix them, so the business/office is worth more and could actually run without the person who built it. Leave the world better than you found it.
Here's the part I actually care about, because it's where my development past meets my advisor future.
This kind of support is generally reserved for bigger companies, because those are the ones who can afford the full package. The methodology I just got certified in was built for the upper-middle market, businesses with a few million in revenue and the budget for a standing team of in-house advisors. The instruction, over and over, is engage your advisory team. Assemble your CPA, your attorney, your financial planner, your wealth manager, all of whom are on speed-dial and all of whom know the target business like the back of their hand already because it's possibly their only client.
For the scale that this methodology is targeting, that is absolutely correct. No one person, no one CEPA, could do this kind of work for a multi-million company, and they shouldn't try. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. The problem, as I see it, is that most business owners, the small boutique, the bakery, the florist, the person who built something real out of their own two hands, the backbone of the American economy, they get missed. They can't afford to retain a five-person advisory team, I'm lucky if they have a competent bookkeeper and CPA, and separate business and personal accounts. They can't afford the full priced package all at one go. They're seen as below the cost-effective threshold, so the most useful analysis in the field never reaches the people who arguably need it most.
That's the gap I want to close. I want to take this framework, the honest look at what your business is worth and whether it could survive without you, or you without it, and size it to fit an owner who's running the whole thing themselves. The same clear-eyed diagnostic, at a price and a scale a solo owner can actually use. I want to build the tools to make this attainable for all businesses, regardless of their EBITDA. EPI's framework is incredibly strong, I just want to make it accessible.
I'm testing my tools on myself first. Before I ran this on anyone else's business, I ran it on my own, and I scored worse than I'd have liked. That's the next post, because what I learned from working through my own low readiness score changed how I think the whole thing should work for small owners.
* For those of us from USAID, CEPA is pronounced "see-pah" rather than spelled out letter by letter, like I got used to doing.