Coaching for Leaders and Founders
Coaching for Leaders and Founders
HOW EARN THE RIGHT EXIT WORKS
The programme was created from the work I have done and continue to deliver for clients. Those sesssions started with a question . Would you buy your business without you in it?
Most of the time, the honest answer was no. The Earn the Exit Programme was built around creating a YES to that question.
The spine underneath it
Everything I build runs on the same three things. Values, vision, method.
Values
Values do not move. They are what the business, and the person running it, stand for, regardless of whether anyone is watching.
Vision
Vision has to be an outcome, not a direction. For Keystone, the outcome is stated plainly from the first conversation.
A completed sale, at the right price,
Method
Method is the two-day intensive that sets the OKRs, followed by a weekly rhythm that holds them, repeated across the length of the engagement.
It starts before anyone talks about OKRs
We want to hear from the leadership team
Every senior exec gets a discovery call, one at a time. The CFO sees a different business than the CEO does. The person running delivery sees a different one again. I want all of those views before I have a single conversation about strategy, not a version that's already been smoothed into agreement by the time it reaches me.
Alongside that, I agree a mandate directly with the founder. What can be shared across the team, what can't, and who needs to know what, before any of this starts. An exit is not always something everyone in the business knows is coming, and that has to be handled deliberately, not assumed.
If the senior team already knows OKRs, we run a short recap. If they don't, it's a longer session, an hour, built specifically around how OKRs are used to drive an exit, not a generic introduction.
Alongside the discovery calls, I run a straightforward read of the numbers a buyer's own diligence team would look for. Contracted revenue as a share of the total. Client concentration. Gross margin by service line. Founder dependency, named function by function. Where the business runs on software, or competes with something that increasingly does, this is also where the harder question gets asked directly. How much of this could a well-funded, agent-native competitor rebuild in eighteen months.
We will the spend 2 days together
Split into 4 half-days
Half day one. An honest retrospective. What's been tried before, what worked, what didn't. I push for real honesty here, not a polished version of events, because the fastest way to waste the next eighteen months is to repeat a mistake nobody named the first time.
Half day two. Formulating the strategy. What does success actually look like. What's genuinely getting in the way right now, and what would have to be true in a year for that to no longer be the case. This is where the OKRs for the exit start to take shape, and it's also where we start building the equity story properly, the numbers a buyer will look for and the broader brand story underneath them.
Half day three. Every senior leader walks out with their own OKR, interlinked and aligned to the same exit vision, not a target handed down to them. We test each one against whether it's genuinely values-based, whether it's honest, and whether the team believes it's achievable, because a target nobody believes in doesn't survive contact with the rest of the organisation.
Half day four. Method. The tactics. What resources are aligned, what isn't, what needs to stop, what needs more of it. Whether the AI story is where it needs to be. Whether the business has the capability behind the story it's telling.
.What happens after the two days?
Myself and the coaching team will come back with a full plan and a tracking dashboard.
From there, it's a weekly thirty-minute check-in. Not a status update. A conversation about whether the needle has actually moved, and if it hasn't, why not. The whole point is keeping activity aligned to the outcome, week by week, not quarter by quarter.
I've built this exact process before, and I'm running it successfully right now with clients facing precisely this challenge. It isn't borrowed from anyone else's methodology.
Exit Ready OKRs
Every senior exec carries an Exit Ready OKR from three types.
Aligned.
At least one Aligned OKR has to be a Valuation OKR, tied to a number a buyer would actually model. Owned by a named person, not the founder.
Strategic.
Capability that makes the business worth more before a sale process ever starts. Contract hygiene is the clearest example. Moving legacy rolling agreements onto proper multi-year terms does not move this quarter's number. It moves the multiple.graph text here.
Foundation.
Keeping delivery, compliance, and integration solid enough that due diligence does not surface it later as a red flag
Who holds it once we step back?
One senior person, deliberately not the founder, is named programme owner. Their job is to hold the standard between the weekly check-ins, not just during them. Naming the founder to that role would prove the opposite of what the programme is there to demonstrate. That the business survives without them.
What you get at the end
A founder-dependency score, tracked from kickoff to the point of sale. Movement on the specific numbers a quality-of-earnings review scrutinises. And a buyer-ready evidence pack your corporate finance adviser can take to market, built over the hold period rather than assembled in a scramble before the data room opens.
This does not replace a corporate finance adviser. It is the work that makes the conversation shorter when you meet them.
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