For wealth managers, RIAs and family offices
ExitBlueprint gives an independent advisor the whole of exit preparation, years before there is a deal: a structured readiness assessment you run inside a normal review, the gaps it surfaces ranked into a roadmap, and a document your client takes home with your firm's name on it.
In a review you already hold · Scored by rule, not a model
Client readout · sample
48 sub-scores
This is what your client leaves the meeting holding, on your firm’s letterhead. The business is nearly ready. The owner is not, and that is the conversation only you can have.
You find out after the wire clears.
An advisor takes on an owner at forty-eight and does everything right for twelve years: the planning, the insurance, the kids, the second home. At sixty the owner hires an investment banker. For nine months that banker runs the calendar and is the most trusted voice in the owner's life. At closing there is one warm introduction, and twelve years of relationship equity transfers in a single sentence.
By the time a transaction is real, the professional team is chosen and the process belongs to someone else. The decision about who manages the proceeds was made well before anyone called it a deal.
None of this is anyone behaving badly. The banker sells the company, and sells it hard, which is what they were hired for. The gap is that nobody was doing the advisor's job early enough for it to matter.
Most of the client's net worth sits inside an operating company you cannot manage and are rarely asked about. It converts to cash exactly once, and that single event decides the next decade of the relationship.
What the client gets
The output is not a dashboard you log into. It is a document you hand across the table, in your firm's branding, that tells an owner where the business actually stands and what to do about it first. It exports clean for your books-and-records archiving.
Readiness, whether or not they sell. Nothing in it recommends a transaction, and nothing in it depends on one happening.
Prepared for an owner-client · reviewed quarterly
Where to start
The after-tax figure that makes the next chapter work has never been written down, so no offer can be evaluated against anything. This is the shortest leg and it is entirely in your lane.
The largest account carries more revenue than a buyer will underwrite without structure. Left alone it shows up as escrow and earnout rather than as price.
Undocumented adjustments get disallowed under a quality-of-earnings review, which pulls the earnings base down and compresses the multiple applied to it.
Indicative scoring for planning discussion. Not a valuation, an appraisal, a tax opinion, or legal advice. Value figures are estimates for discussion with the client's CPA and counsel.
The method
Three scores, each on its own 0–100 scale, each computed by rule from the owner's answers against a versioned rubric. Run the same answers twice and you get the same number twice. No model writes a score, adjusts one, or reasons about one, which is what lets a fiduciary hand it to a client and defend every line of it.
Averaged, the sample owner above is a 63 — a tidy number that buries the leg actually holding up the deal. We never compute it.
Will it survive diligence and change hands without the owner? Owner independence, financial statement quality, management depth, customer concentration, documented process, contract transferability. This is the leg a buyer's team is paid to attack.
76% measured24% self-rated
Why would a buyer compete for it? Recurring revenue, growth track record, differentiation and pricing power, margin performance. Readiness gets the business through diligence intact; attractiveness is what expands the multiple it starts from.
40% measured60% self-rated
Is the owner ready? The after-tax number they actually need, what they are retiring to, transition runway, exit-path clarity, comfort with a net worth tied up in one asset. Scored independently of the business, and it never enters the DRS. This is the leg your client hired you for.
14% measured86% self-rated
Before anyone sells
If a tool only pays off at an exit three years out, it is not yet worth a line in your budget. The readiness process earns its place in the meetings you already hold.
Run the assessment with no transaction on the horizon. It fits the meeting already on the calendar, and it does not require the client to be thinking about selling.
Re-score on the engagement's own clock. The delta is the agenda: what closed, what slipped, and what it changed about the range the business would trade in.
The owner conversation stops being an account update and becomes a plan with a document attached, tracked across years rather than restarted every January.
Most owners have never been asked these questions by an advisor. Walking a prospect through the readiness conversation is the differentiator, long before anyone in the room has a deal.
Two boundaries worth being precise about, because getting either one wrong is how a platform ends up competing with the people it needs on its side.
Invite the CPA, the attorney and the banker into the same readiness picture, so the conversation starts from one set of facts instead of four.
Nobody is displaced. The CPA keeps the tax work and gets a better-prepared client, counsel keeps the documents and the deal structure, and the process still runs through you.
We do not project retirement income, model a drawdown, or run the financial plan. That is your work and the software you already pay for.
What we do is hand that stack a defensible set of numbers: a value range for the business, a net-proceeds view, and a readiness picture that says how much of it is real yet. The estimates are for discussion with the client's CPA and counsel.
The arithmetic
Nobody can quote you a credible retention rate for this, so we will not try. Put your own numbers in instead. The figure that matters is the one you produce.
How many of those do you expect to still be managing eighteen months after the sale?
Enterprise value effect, illustrative only: RIA valuation multiples vary widely.
Why now
If you have owner clients heading toward a transition, this is worth a conversation now rather than after someone else has started one.
Get startedWould you rather talk it through first? Tell us about your book.
Rather talk it through
If you would rather speak to someone before signing up, this is the way in. Five questions, and one of them is the only qualifier that matters. If the fit is not there we will say so.