Richard Conduit has sold two businesses and built a third specifically with the exit in mind from the first day of operation. The perspective he brings to discussions about building and selling is practical rather than theoretical — he has negotiated from both sides of the transaction and knows what buyers actually look for versus what sellers assume buyers are looking for.

"Most founders think a buyer is paying for what the business does," he said in his Delavera interview. "The best buyers are paying for what the business does without the founder." The distinction, he argues, is the single most important variable in business valuation that most owners fail to address until the moment they're trying to sell.

A business that requires its founder's daily involvement to function is not a business in the acquisition sense. It is a job with overhead. The buyer of such a business is taking on a complicated job, not acquiring an asset. The multiples they're willing to pay reflect that difference.

Conduit's approach to building his third business, from the first month, was to design every process as if he were going to hand it to someone else the following week. Client onboarding was documented before the first client was onboarded. Content creation had a brief before the first piece of content was commissioned. Financial reporting was systematized before the first month of trading was complete.

"It takes more time upfront," he acknowledges. "But you spend that time once. If you don't do it, you spend the time every single time — and you can never leave."

The businesses that sell for strong multiples in his experience share several consistent qualities: revenue that is predictable and recurring rather than project-based, customer relationships that transfer with the business rather than belonging personally to the founder, processes documented well enough that a capable person could execute them without the founder's guidance, and a clear narrative about why the business will be worth more in three years than it is today.

He sold his second business at 4.8 times annual revenue. The industry average for comparable businesses was 2.1 times. The gap, he says, was almost entirely explained by the documentation and systematization he had built into the business over four years before the sale.