Engineering an Exit
What I’ve learned from having my business acquired, nearly selling another more than once, investing in 60+ startups, and watching M&A play out from every angle.
Most founders think about exits the wrong way.
They imagine a financial negotiation. A number you reach, shake hands on, and walk away from. A moment where the future becomes secure.
That’s not what it is.
An exit is a people transaction with a financial element attached, not the other way around. The number, the multiple, the headline valuation that everyone obsesses over? That’s actually the easiest part. Once both sides are serious, the price finds itself.
You agree or you walk away.
What kills deals isn’t the number. It’s people. It’s pace. It’s the absence of someone on the buyer side who genuinely wants to make it happen.
I know this from direct experience. My business was acquired by a major technology company. I’ve watched a different business nearly sell across multiple separate processes, each one getting further than the last. I’ve invested in 60+ startups and seen the full spectrum: clean exits, missed windows, deals that died at 95% because nobody manufactured the urgency to close.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
The Market Right Now
The M&A landscape has shifted dramatically in five years. Most founders are operating with assumptions that no longer hold. The below is specific to software businesses.
The SaaS M&A boom of 2021 was an anomaly. Low interest rates, abundant capital, and pandemic-driven digital acceleration created a window where public SaaS multiples peaked at 18x revenue and private deals regularly closed at 6–8x ARR.
Founders who exited in that window caught something rare. Most of them know it.
Then rates rose sharply. The window closed. By 2023, median private SaaS multiples had compressed to around 3x revenue. The passive approach, where interest arrived unsolicited and multiple offers appeared without founders having to engineer competition, stopped working overnight.
What’s happened since is more interesting than the doom narrative suggests.
SaaS M&A activity in 2025 reached its highest level on record, with 2,698 transactions completed, up 28% year-on-year.
Deal volume has fully recovered. AI-referenced targets accounted for approximately 72% of all SaaS M&A transactions in 2025. If your product story doesn’t include a credible AI angle, you’re starting every conversation at a disadvantage.
Multiples have stabilised, but the spread between average and exceptional exits has never been wider. Two companies with identical ARR can sell for completely different prices.
Understanding why is the whole game.
Will the 2021 peaks return? Possibly.
AI is already driving a new wave of buyer conviction, and capital follows narrative. The businesses positioned at the intersection of AI capability and recurring revenue are commanding premiums that would have seemed optimistic two years ago.
What I’m confident about is this: average businesses will not recapture those multiples.
Exceptional ones might.
What Your Business Is Actually Worth
One of the most consistent sources of founder disappointment in M&A is the gap between what founders believe their business is worth and what the market will pay. Here’s an honest breakdown by stage.
Under £1M ARR
You’re not selling on revenue multiples. Buyers are paying for profit, typically 2x to 4x earnings. The business is still owner-operated in most buyers’ eyes and they’re pricing the risk of that dependency. The buyer pool here is individuals, not institutions.
£1M to £3M ARR
Revenue multiples start to apply, though the buyer pool is still relatively narrow: individual acquirers, search funds, and in some cases strategic acquirers moving quickly for a product or technology rather than the revenue itself. At this stage, a strategic buyer might acquire you for what you’ve built rather than what you’ve sold. Multiples typically range from 2x to 4x ARR, though strategic interest can push that higher when the product is precisely what they need.
£3M to £5M ARR
This is the first meaningful inflection point. Growth PE and larger strategic buyers start to arrive. Multiples widen to 4x to 6x for clean businesses. This is the range where a properly structured process, run with an advisor, with competitive tension and a clear narrative, makes a material financial difference for the first time.
£5M to £15M ARR
The full buyer spectrum opens up. PE platforms, strategic acquirers, larger search funds, all competing. The spread widens considerably. Median outcomes for strong businesses sit in the 5x to 8x range, but the ceiling is much higher. Companies with net revenue retention above 120% have achieved median multiples of 11.7x. Businesses with Rule of 40 scores above 50 and strong retention are regularly transacting at 8x to 12x. The process you run here has a dramatic effect on the outcome. A good M&A advisor typically pays for themselves ten times over through deal value, not just process management.
£15M and above
You’re in a different conversation. EBITDA multiples start to matter alongside revenue. Growth equity mechanics, pre-IPO positioning, and strategic premium all come into play. Governance, cap table structure, and board dynamics become material factors in what you can achieve and how long it takes.
The two numbers that matter most
Whatever your ARR, two metrics move your multiple more than anything else: net revenue retention and your Rule of 40 score. These are worth obsessing over in the twelve months before you go to market.
What Kills Deals
Here’s the thing most founders spend the most time worrying about: the valuation.
And here’s the reality: that’s the easiest part.
There are comps. Both sides are typically working from the same data. Once both parties are serious, the price finds itself.
You agree or one of you walks away.
That negotiation, for all the anxiety it generates, is relatively clean.
What kills deals isn’t money. It’s pace. It’s the absence of someone on the buyer side who genuinely, personally wants this to happen.
I’ve nearly sold a business more than once. Different processes, different buyers each time, each one getting further than the last. The pattern across all of them was the same. Nobody on the buyer side was truly driving it.
Acquisitions die in the gap between “we’re interested” and someone internally deciding this deal has to happen.
Without that person, someone with real authority and a genuine personal stake in closing, momentum evaporates. Lawyers get busy. A new quarter begins. Another strategic priority emerges. The deal that was 90% done quietly becomes a deal that didn’t.
Time kills deals. This is not a cliché. It is the mechanism.
Every week that passes is a week for priorities to shift, for an internal reorganisation to change who’s in the room, for a new initiative to make your deal feel less urgent. Move fast. Create urgency. Compress timelines intentionally. Stack your conversations with multiple buyers in parallel rather than sequentially.
Before you enter a process, ask one question most founders never ask: who is our champion on the other side? What do they personally gain from this deal completing? What’s their internal mandate? If you can’t answer those questions with confidence, you are not as close as you think.
What Acquirers Actually Want
Different buyers want fundamentally different things. They rarely tell you what those things are until the deal is done.
Strategic acquirers, large technology companies and well-capitalised businesses expanding into your category, are often as interested in capability and market knowledge as they are in revenue. They’re buying product intuition. Domain expertise. The compounded understanding of a team, or in some cases specific individuals within that team, who know a space better than they do.
Here’s what my experience of being acquired taught me, which I’ve since seen confirmed across dozens of investments: founders matter far more to acquirers than most founders realise.
It’s easy to assume the management team you’ve spent years building is what the acquirer is buying. Sometimes that’s true. But strategic acquirers are often acutely aware that the drive and direction of a business concentrates in one or a handful of people. The product can be rebuilt. The customers can be managed. But the person who carries the deep market knowledge, the customer relationships, the product intuition: that’s genuinely scarce, and acquirers price it accordingly.
The implication for how you present in a process: don’t downplay your centrality to the business to make it look more institutional. If you are the asset, lean into it. Just understand what that means for what comes after. If they’re buying you, they will expect you to stay.
Roll-up acquirers aren’t buying your vision. They’re buying your customers, your contracts, and your position in a category they’re trying to own. What matters to them is how cleanly you slot into their combined entity and what you add to the whole. Know this before the conversation starts, because the negotiation plays out completely differently.
Private equity is the most transactional and most misunderstood buyer type for first-time founders. PE firms are not building companies. They are building portfolios of cash flows. They will pay a fair multiple for a predictable business, add leverage, optimise for efficiency, grow revenue through a defined playbook, and sell in three to seven years. Founders who sell to PE expecting a creative mission-driven partner will be consistently disappointed. Know what you’re walking into.
The Three Types of Acquisition
Strategic acquisitions are what most founders dream about. A large company buys you to accelerate something they’re already doing.
The upside is real. Your product reaches more customers. Your team gets resources it never had. The deal can be genuinely transformational.
The reality is more complicated. Large companies move slowly. Politics exist at every level. The earn-out can be the hardest professional period of your career, because you’re now accountable to a machine that operates nothing like the one you built. Go in with eyes open.
Roll-up acquisitions are, in my view, one of the most underappreciated value creation opportunities in the UK startup ecosystem right now. More on this in the next section.
Financial acquisitions through private equity work when both sides understand the terms of the relationship. The structure of the deal matters as much as the price. Earnouts, rollover equity, management incentive plans, restrictive covenants: this is where founders either protect themselves or get taken advantage of. Get proper M&A legal counsel, not your startup lawyer who handles employment contracts. The difference in outcome is significant.
My Conviction on UK Roll-Ups
I want to spend real time on this.
Between 2018 and 2023, the UK produced an extraordinary number of SaaS businesses. Many raised seed or Series A funding, found genuine product-market fit, built real teams, grew to £1M to £5M ARR.
And then stalled.
Not failed. Stalled.
They’re running. Customers are paying. The product works. But the growth that would justify another venture round hasn’t arrived. The revenue that would attract a strategic acquirer isn’t there yet. The profitability that would make a standalone PE buyout attractive doesn’t exist. These businesses are caught in a gap: too good to die, too small to break out.
There are hundreds of them.
The opportunity is not to help them individually find their way out of that gap. The opportunity is to pull several of them together into something worth dramatically more than the sum of its parts.
The thesis
Identify four to six subscale SaaS businesses operating in adjacent spaces within a vertical market. Acquire them at multiples that reflect their individual limitations, typically 3x to 5x ARR for businesses in the stalled zone. Ideally acquire them for paper. Or mostly paper, some cash.
Integrate them properly: not just under a holding company, but at the product level, the data level, the customer success level. Remove operational duplication. Keep the best talent. Build a unified product layer that addresses the complete customer workflow rather than a single point within it.
What you’ve created is no longer a portfolio of small SaaS businesses. It’s a category leader. A company with comprehensive workflow coverage, meaningful switching costs, a data advantage that point solutions can’t replicate, and a market position none of the individual businesses could have achieved alone.
Sell that to PE or a larger strategic at 6x to 9x combined ARR and the value creation is significant for everyone involved.
Why verticals
The most attractive roll-up targets are vertical markets with high fragmentation, clear workflow adjacencies, and enterprise buyers who want one vendor rather than five. Healthcare technology. Legal tech. Construction software. HR and workforce management.
These are markets where the buyer has genuine pain from managing multiple disconnected tools. They would pay a meaningful premium for an integrated solution. The startup ecosystem has produced the component parts. What’s missing is the integrator willing to do the hard operational work.
The AI layer
When you integrate several SaaS businesses that each sit at different points in a customer’s workflow, you create something none of them had individually: a comprehensive data layer spanning the entire customer journey.
AI trained on siloed, single-point data produces incremental improvements. AI trained on comprehensive workflow data produces insights and automation that customers can’t get anywhere else. That’s not a feature. That’s a moat.
I haven’t done a roll-up yet. But I’ve watched them work and I’ve watched them fail. The ones that work treat integration as the product, not as the afterthought. The acquisition is easy. Building what the acquisitions become: that’s the actual work.
Why now
The businesses that stalled at £1M to £5M ARR between 2018 and 2023 are approaching the point where investors need resolution. Patient capital is running out. Founders are tired. The assets are available at sensible multiples because the alternative, continuing to run a subscale business with no clear path to breakout, is increasingly unattractive.
In two or three years, this cohort will have resolved itself, through attrition, individual sales, or shutdown, but not in a way that captured the value. The window is open. It won’t stay open indefinitely.
The AI Overhang
One thing every founder thinking about an exit in the next two years needs to understand.
AI is changing what acquirers will pay for and what they won’t.
In 2025, 72% of all SaaS M&A transactions involved companies with a credible AI story. Buyers are not just buying what your product does today. They’re buying what your product becomes when AI is applied to it. The data advantage, the workflow intelligence, the automation potential that sits latent in your customer base and your product architecture.
If you can show an acquirer what becomes possible when AI is applied to your data and your workflow, you have real leverage. If your AI story is retrofitted, vague, or missing, your multiple reflects that.
The businesses that will command premium exits in the next few years are not simply those with the highest ARR. They are those that can show an acquirer exactly what they become in an AI-enabled world.
Build that story before the process starts, not in a management presentation when it’s too late to change anything.
What I’d Tell a Founder Going Into a Process
Get clear on what type of buyer you’re talking to. You won’t fully know until it’s over, but the signals are there. Who do they bring to meetings? What do they ask? How urgently are they moving?
Find your champion on their side. A deal without an internal advocate at the buyer is not a deal, it’s a conversation. Make their job as easy as possible.
Build a narrative, not just a deck. What does the world look like when this deal completes? Why is now the right moment? Why your business specifically? Answer those questions before you get to any slide about ARR.
Know your own centrality to the business and decide before the process starts whether you’re willing to stay if that’s what the deal requires. It will come up.
Use an advisor if your ARR is above £3M. The fee is real. The value they add through comparable data, process management, and genuine competitive tension is consistently greater than the cost.
Move fast. Create urgency. Time kills deals.
And if a process falls apart, as it might and more than once, it is not a verdict on the business. It may simply mean the champion wasn’t there, the timing was wrong, or the buyer wasn’t as ready as they seemed.
Keep building. The right deal, at the right time, with the right buyer, finds itself.
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