How to build a company you can sell so well that you might decide to keep running it instead

You built the company, or bought into it early, and you've run it for a long time. It works. It just doesn't work without you yet.

• You own most or all of a company doing £/$3–20M, with somewhere between 25 and 120 people.
• You expect to sell, hand over or step back in the next three to seven years, but haven't decided how.
• The biggest clients, the hardest calls and the real numbers still end up on your desk.
• You've never had the company valued, or you had it done once and didn't like the number.

Probably not for you if you're selling in the next 24 months: you need an M&A advisor now, not a panel. Same if your company is investor-backed.

Three people who spend their working weeks inside owner-led companies. Five questions, then yours.

1. What does a buyer look at first in an owner-led company, and what makes them walk away?
2. Where does the owner being needed cost the most when a price gets put on the company?
3. What's the biggest mistake owners make three to five years before they want out?
4. What are the three things to start this year, whether you sell or not?
5. Why do some owners build a company a buyer would pay well for, and then decide to keep it?
6. Your questions, answered live.

• What a buyer checks first

  From people who sit on that side of the table, and the warning signs that cut the price.

• Where you're costing yourself

  The decisions, clients and numbers that still run through you, and what each one does to the company's value.

• Three things to start this year

  From each panelist. Useful whether the company goes to a buyer, a successor or nobody.

• A free resource from each panelist

  One practical tool each, so you can keep working on it after the hour is up.