Should We Sell the Company
What Founders need to decide

What a founder is actually deciding here

A founder is not a CEO with a smaller title. The business, the mortgage, and the story they tell themselves about why they started are the same object. An answer that is correct for a professional manager — hire a number two, sell a minority, stop taking the emergency calls — can be personally unworkable, and an answer that protects identity can be expensive. Useful analysis names both without pretending they are the same.

Founders also have a data problem CEOs of larger companies have already paid to fix. The books are messy, the “best customer” is a feeling, and the constraint is often the founder’s week. An analysis that demands a clean data room will never start. An analysis that uses what exists, marks what it assumed, and still produces a sequence is the one that gets used.

The test of a usable answer is therefore different. It has to survive a Sunday evening when nobody else is in the building: is this still the company I want to own, can I fund the next move without a fantasy raise, and what would I see in sixty days that means stop. Those are not board-pack tests. They are owner tests.

The problem in one paragraph

Sell versus keep is a capital-allocation question with a personal overlay. The overlay does not remove the arithmetic. Founders type this when they are tired, when a competitor calls, or when a number they saw on someone else’s deal does not match their own P&L. Boards type it when a director wants liquidity. The analysis is the same: what would a buyer actually underwrite, what is personal to the current owner, and whether two more years of compounding beat a sale after tax and after the business is no longer yours.

Read the full treatment of should we sell the company, including the signals that distinguish it from neighbouring problems and the move that usually makes it worse.

What an answer has to satisfy before a founder can use it

Choosing a move you still have to live inside, not only approve. In practice that means four things:

✓ The recommendation still works if you remain the scarce resource for another two quarters
✓ Personal cash and company cash are separated in the arithmetic, not blended into “we”
✓ Control consequences are explicit — what you give up if you hire, raise, or sell
✓ A kill criterion is dated in weeks, not in a strategy cycle you do not have

The failure mode to watch for. The characteristic founder failure is treating a lifestyle constraint as a strategy. Keeping every customer, every product, and every decision because “it is my company” is how owner dependence becomes the whole valuation.

What the analysis produces

This question routes to Growth Portfolio Framework (catalog id bcg-v2) and works through owner earnings quality, dependency on the seller, what a buyer would actually pay for, value of waiting versus running a process. The output is a sequence with a stopping rule, and every figure carries its derivation — which is the property that matters when control, personal cash, and identity are in the same decision as the P&L.

Read a complete report and judge whether it would survive your own scrutiny. No email required.

Industry cuts

No {slug}-in-{industry} pages for this question yet — those wait on a run excerpt. Home-services operators (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, cleaning) hit the same binds as other owner-operated trades: crews fully booked, contribution unknown by job type, and growth that still depends on the owner answering the phone. Percision can analyse that shape of business. There is no /strategy-for-home-services hub yet — industry pages ship only with a named profile and an unedited run excerpt, so this language lives on the operator pages rather than as a twelfth grid.

Who this is not for

Percision is the wrong tool if you already know the answer and only need execution capacity, or if the business is pre-revenue — then the constraint is evidence about the market, not analysis of your own figures. Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library. Also wrong if you need facilitation, politics, or someone to sit with a lender or buyer. Those are human jobs.

Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library.

Questions Founders ask

I am the CEO and the founder. Which page is for me?

Use this cut when the binding constraint is ownership — cash you personally guarantee, control, or whether you still want the job. Use the CEO cut when the binding constraint is choosing between defensible options the rest of a leadership team is arguing. Many people need both; they are not the same page.

Will this tell me to sell?

Only if the owner-value arithmetic says waiting is worse, and only as a decision with assumptions attached. It will not run a process or value the shares for a filing.

What if my numbers are in a shoebox?

Then the first output is which numbers are load-bearing. That is more useful than waiting for a bookkeeper to catch up before you decide anything.

Is /for/founders the same as these pages?

/for/founders is the role hub. These pages are problem-level cuts — the same symptom, rewritten for the owner’s test rather than the chief executive’s.

Is this a valuation?

It is a decision about whether to sell, wait, or recap, using the same owner-value logic as the worth page. It is not a licensed appraisal and not quality-of-earnings as an audit product.

When is Percision the wrong tool?

Percision is the wrong tool if you already know the answer and only need execution capacity, or if the business is pre-revenue — then the constraint is evidence about the market, not analysis of your own figures. Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library. Also wrong if you need facilitation, politics, or someone to sit with a lender or buyer. Those are human jobs.

Does Percision replace a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, or AI implementation team?

Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library.