The best exits don't start when the banker enters the room. They start twelve to eighteen months earlier — in the quiet work of tightening margins, cleaning cap tables, and rehearsing the narrative until it's the one buyers repeat back to you.
By the time due diligence begins, the outcome is largely priced in. What looks like negotiation is often just discovery — the buyer verifying what your positioning already told them.
At Stir Advisors we treat sell-side mandates as an operating programme, not a brochure process. The unfair advantage isn't a louder auction — it's a founder who ran a twelve-month process disguised as ordinary excellence.