Ideally, Amanda explains that business owners should begin personal financial planning around three to five years before an anticipated exit, although she makes it clear that there is rarely such a thing as starting too early.

“The most successful exits are normally planned backwards, from the owner’s future life and lifestyle rather than forwards to the sale date,” she says.

Business owners can spend years concentrating on turnover, profitability and ultimately the value of their company. In comparison, they spend relatively little time defining what they actually want the proceeds of a sale to enable them to do.

That lack of forward planning appears to be widespread: a 2025 survey of 250 UK small business owners found that 79% did not have an exit strategy in place.

“For some, the aim of the sale is to provide complete financial independence,” Amanda says, “While for others it’s about funding a particular lifestyle in retirement, provide greater security for their family, pass wealth to the next generation or invest in another venture.”

Starting those conversations early gives the business exit a personal context. Instead of seeing the sale as an end in itself, the owner can start to think about how it fits into the life they want afterwards.

One of the most useful things an owner can establish before entering serious negotiations is their own financial “number”.

Amanda explains that this means looking at their existing wealth and arrangements, their current spending, and the lifestyle they hope to enjoy in the future. Then modelling how different scenarios might play out.

Inflation, tax, longevity and potential changes in spending can all form part of the picture.

“Until they know their number, every offer they receive could feel too low or not enough,” she says.

That can make a big difference to the way an owner approaches a sale. Instead of simply trying to achieve the highest possible valuation, they have a much clearer idea of what the proceeds actually need to do.

Amanda adds: “We’re doing all of this to help them create a target, as opposed to having them chasing the highest possible number.”

Sometimes the modelling shows that more work needs to be done before the business is ready to sell. In other cases, owners discover they need considerably less than they’d assumed.

Either way, knowing the number can take some of the emotion out of the decision. It gives the owner something concrete against which to assess the offers that eventually arrive.

As a planned sale date draws near, attention naturally shifts towards the transaction.

The final stages can be intense. The owner still has a business to run, while also dealing with valuations, due diligence, negotiations and the practical demands of getting a transaction over the line.

“The closer they get to the transaction, the more important certainty becomes,” Amanda says.

“At this point, we’ll have started exploring the broader questions around lifestyle, family and future financial needs,” explains Amanda. “We can then adjust the financial plan as the shape of the deal becomes clearer.”

This is also when the emotional reality of selling can start to hit. Questions about maintaining income after the sale, family expectations and even the owner’s identity beyond the business can suddenly feel much less theoretical.

“For someone who has spent decades building a company, it isn’t always straightforward to imagine what comes next,” Amanda says. “Having a plan helps bring those conversations forward. You can start to join the dots between the sale, the life you want afterwards and what you need financially to make that life possible. Without that, it can be much harder to know whether you’re making the right decisions.”

One of Amanda’s strongest messages is not to assume that everything can simply be sorted out once the deal is complete. “The biggest cost of late planning is lost opportunities,” she says.

Depending on an owner’s circumstances, conversations ahead of a sale could cover pensions, family gifting, estate planning, trusts, philanthropy, business ownership arrangements or provision for key employees.

Some of those areas may require specialist tax or legal advice, and not every option will be appropriate for every owner. But identifying them early gives the owner and their advisers time to decide what, if anything, needs to happen before the transaction moves too far forward.

“Business owners shouldn’t assume they can resolve everything after the deal,” Amanda says.

There’s also a practical benefit to doing more of the thinking early on. Once a transaction gathers pace, the owner is likely to have considerably less time and headspace for decisions that could’ve been considered months or even years beforehand.

Once negotiations are under way, the financial planner’s perspective can become particularly useful.

At that stage, much of the conversation is understandably focused on completing the transaction. The planner can help the owner step away from the headline number for a moment and consider what each option would actually mean for their finances, lifestyle and future plans.

That matters because offers identical in price are rarely identical in structure. They might involve different combinations of cash, deferred payments or earn-outs. One buyer may expect the owner to remain involved for several years, while another may offer a much earlier exit.

“A £10 million offer isn’t necessarily better than an £8 million offer if the second one delivers the outcomes the owner really cares about,” Amanda says.

For one owner, certainty may matter most. For another, protecting employees could be particularly important. Someone else may place a greater value on stepping away sooner or reducing the risk attached to an earn-out.

“That’s where having done the personal planning beforehand really comes into its own,” explains Amanda. “When you’re in the middle of a pressured negotiation you don’t want to be trying to work out for the first time what really matters to you. If you’ve already done that work you have a framework against which to make those decisions, and can have much more confidence in the choices you’re making.”

A business sale can involve a sizeable professional team, and Amanda believes the strongest results come when those advisers work together rather than in isolation.

“The best outcomes we’ve had have been from coordinated planning and advice, with each adviser bringing a different perspective,” she says.

The corporate finance adviser may be driving the transaction, lawyers protecting the owner’s legal interests and accountants advising on tax and structure. The financial planner brings the focus back to the owner’s personal objectives and longer-term financial security.

That can mean shared meetings, regular conversations between advisers and a clear understanding of which decisions need to be made – and when. Without that level of teamwork, there’s a greater risk of conflicting advice or opportunities being missed as the transaction gathers momentum.

Amanda sums it up neatly: “The transaction may last months, possibly years, but the consequences of the decisions made during it can last a lifetime.”

For all the complexity around selling a business, Amanda says one of the most common problems is surprisingly simple: owners leaving the planning too late.

A financial planner can still add value if they’re brought in only a few months before a transaction. But there may be fewer options available and less time to explore them properly.

Amanda also sees owners becoming understandably fixated on valuation. The assumption that a sufficiently large sale price will automatically make everything else fall into place can be an uncomfortable one to test at the eleventh hour.

“We’ve seen a transaction almost fall over because the sellers hadn’t really defined what life after the business would look like,” she says. “When it came to the point of making the decision, they were suddenly asking themselves, ‘Should we? Shouldn’t we?’ because they hadn’t spent enough time thinking about what the sale would actually mean for them.”

Amanda gives the example of two business owners who had always seen the eventual sale of their technology company as their retirement plan.

“They met one of our financial planners around eight years before the sale,” Amanda says. “While the business was still very much their retirement plan, they started building wealth elsewhere too, including funding their pensions and setting money aside for their children.

By the time they were ready to sell, things had changed. The tech market had moved on, with AI among the factors affecting valuations, and the business was eventually valued at around a third of what it might once have achieved.

That could have been a real problem. But because they’d spent those eight years building up other assets and regularly reviewing what they would need from the sale, they were in a much stronger position.

The lower valuation was disappointing, but it didn’t derail their plans. The sale proceeds were still enough to top up the wealth they had already built and support the lifestyle they wanted afterwards.

Amanda believes that, without that earlier planning, they may have felt they had no option but to keep working for another three or four years and hope the value of the business recovered.

Instead, they had enough flexibility to make a different choice. They could accept the lower offer, sell the business and move on with their lives.

Good exit planning is about giving yourself time to think before the pressure of a sale takes over.

That means starting with some fairly simple questions.

What would you like your life to look like after the business? How much income will you need? What matters to you besides the sale price? Are there family, succession or estate-planning issues you want to address? And how much does the business genuinely need to sell for to make those plans possible?

Having those answers doesn’t remove the uncertainty from a business sale. But it can give an owner a much stronger sense of what they are trying to achieve before the pressure of the transaction begins.

And when the offers eventually arrive, the conversation is no longer simply about what the business is worth. It is also about what happens next.