The Exit Blueprint

You will sell your business once. Everyone on the other side of the table has done it hundreds of times.

That asymmetry is the whole problem. It is also fixable, and not by working harder or being cleverer. It is fixed by knowing what to ask, early enough that the answer still changes something.

Start with the fact that shaped this book. There is no record anywhere of what Australian businesses actually sell for. No register, no sold-price database, no comparables you can look up. When a house sells, the price is recorded and becomes public data. When a business sells, nothing is recorded at all. Which means almost every statistic you are about to be quoted about selling a business in this country is either measuring something else, or invented.

So this book went and checked.

Built on research, not folklore

Every claim here is traced to something. Where a point is law, the section was read and quoted, from the small business capital gains tax concessions to the Australian Consumer Law clock that keeps running for six years after you settle, to the capital gains tax reform that takes effect on 1 July 2027. Where a point is research, the study is named along with its country and its sample size, because a finding about Dutch civil servants is not a finding about Australian tradespeople.

Peer-reviewed work runs through the whole book: Australian longitudinal studies on what actually happens to people after they stop working, management research on why buyers discount owner-dependent businesses, marketing studies measuring what happens to an account when the person who owned the relationship leaves, and experiments showing how professional valuers anchor on a number without knowing they have done it.

And where nobody has done the work, the book says so rather than filling the gap with something confident. There are more of those sentences than the author would like. They are the accurate ones.

Some of what the evidence actually says

• The famous claim that 75% of owners profoundly regret selling traces back to nothing at all. One document prints it as 75% on page thirteen and 70% on page thirty, with no method attached to either.
• Around 88% of Australians who retire show essentially no measurable change in life satisfaction.
• For a sixty-something owner of decades who is genuinely retiring, the capital gains tax on the sale may well come to nothing.
• The likeliest failure is not running out of money. It is dying with most of it unspent.

What is inside

Fourteen chapters follow one owner from the morning a broker's appraisal lands roughly half a million dollars below his retirement number, through three years of preparation, to the Monday after the money arrives. Along the way: what your business is really worth and why a buyer's number differs from yours, the six exit routes including the two nobody will raise with you, getting the business and the numbers ready, the handover, finding a buyer, who you have to tell and when, the contract, what you are still on the hook for after settlement, the tax and superannuation that decide how much you keep, whether it is enough, and who you are on Monday morning.

Every chapter opens with a question owners actually ask, and closes with a checklist, reflection questions and specific action steps. Every figure was verified in August 2026.

You built something that ran for decades, employed people and paid for a life. The last transaction is a specialist skill you never had cause to learn, and that is not a reflection on you. It is the structure of the thing.

Written in Australia, for Australian law and practice.