How tech services founders can sell their firm
for a price they still keep three years later

What you don't know about the sale you heard about

You already know roughly what a competitor sold for. You've heard the figure at a conference, or from a friend of a friend, and you did the maths on your own business on the drive home.

What you don't know is how much of that figure the founder kept.

You might know someone who spent two years in earnout purgatory while the buyer took apart everything they'd built. You might know someone who got burned in due diligence over a contract they could have fixed three years earlier. The stories come back to you at odd hours, usually alongside a question you haven't answered: "What is this thing actually worth, and what happens to me when I sell it?"

Then come the quieter thoughts. "I'll deal with exit planning when things settle down." "When we hit $10M." "When we hire a CFO." Things never settle down, and the next milestone is always one more year away.

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone, and you're not behind because you're bad at business. You built a firm that pays its people well and keeps clients coming back. That took real skill.

The sale gets judged by one number on a cover page, and that number gets paid out over years you no longer control. Everyone in the room knows this except the founder.

Why the biggest offer is often the worst deal for a founder

Founders chase the headline price, and it's easy to see why. It's the number in the press release, the one your peers will hear, the one that feels like a score for ten years of work.

The trouble starts with how that price gets paid. Take two offers Ian walks through in the book. Offer A is $12M: $7M cash at completion and $5M in an earnout over three years, tied to revenue and EBITDA targets. Offer B is $9M: $8M in cash and $1M tied to a single objective milestone.

Offer A looks bigger. But the day after closing, the buyer sets your budget. They can freeze hiring, change your pricing, reassign your best salesperson, or fold your team into another division and load shared costs onto your P&L. Every one of those decisions is legitimate, and every one can cost you money you thought you'd already earned.

A highly certain $8M is worth more than a nominal $12M with real execution risk. The book calls this risk adjusted value, and once you see deals that way, the cover page stops impressing you.

Why a good advisory team still leaves gaps in your sale

The usual answer is to hire good people. You should. Ian is clear that a strong advisor often earns their fee back many times over, and that the book is meant to sit alongside expert guidance, never replace it.

But look at what each of them is actually checking. Your banker's fee is usually a percentage of deal value, and an advisor pitching for your mandate has every reason to quote you an optimistic number. Your lawyer reviews the wording of the earnout. Whether the targets can be hit under a new corporate parent isn't really the lawyer's job. Your accountant handles the tax.

Due diligence has the same gap, on the buyer's side. It's run by lawyers, accountants and financial analysts. The sales, delivery and support leaders who will inherit your team and clients barely take part. They arrive at completion knowing your metrics and nothing about the people who produced them.

So nobody in the process owns the question that matters most to you: what will you actually keep, and what job have you just agreed to do?

Why I wrote this book

The worst moment in my first business started with a letter from the tax office. We hadn't lodged our returns for three years. I'd trusted someone to do it and never checked. The bill was $1.2 million, with 21 days to pay.

We negotiated a payment plan, chased every lead around the clock, and went back to investors for an emergency raise. The raise saved the company. It also diluted my shareholding, and I'd feel that years later.

In a different year, we lost three contracts worth over $1 million each in a single week. One was a mobile app for a casino chain's high roller VIPs, torn up after eighteen of the casino's employees were arrested in China. Another collapsed when 60 Minutes ran a story on a client and the State Government shut their whole industry down by 9am Monday. None of it had anything to do with our delivery.

Eventually I sold. Nine months, eight signatures. When the transfer came through, my wife sat down next to me on the couch with a bottle of champagne, and I opened my banking app. The champagne stayed unopened. Ten years of work had turned into a single figure, and the figure didn't match the ten years.

Then came the part nobody had warned me about. The acquirer never asked what made our team work. I learned about redundancies across my own delivery team in an all-hands meeting, standing next to the people being cut. Not long after we won a global innovation award from Salesforce for a project I'd sold and architected, I was put on a performance plan ten days before Christmas. I found out I'd been terminated from an email I was copied on.

I trained in Tae Kwon Do and Jiu Jitsu for years. When you break a board, you're taught to aim 15 to 30cm behind it, because if you aim at the surface your hand slows down right at contact. Selling a business works the same way. Founders who aim at completion day stop there, and the deal gets set for that day and paid across years they no longer run.

I wrote Acquired so you can aim past the board.

Why preparing years ahead gets founders a better deal than negotiating harder at the end

Founders who start preparing early get better deals, and the difference between them and everyone else is big.

The reason is simple. Your business gets valued on what a sophisticated buyer believes it can become in their hands, and that belief is built from things you can't fake in three months. A recurring revenue base takes 18 to 36 months of deliberate contract strategy. Taking yourself out of the centre of client relationships is a 12 to 36 month job. Buyers want three years of clean accounts, and the clock only starts when you clean them.

Do that work and the negotiation changes shape. You know which earnout terms you'd refuse before anyone proposes them. You have more than one buyer at the table, so you choose the deal. The multiple you get is earned in advance, and it holds up under scrutiny.

The founder first approach to selling a tech services business

Acquired walks you through the whole arc of a sale, in the order you'll live it: who buys, what they pay for, what to fix, how the process runs, how to negotiate the number you actually receive, and what happens after the money moves.

Every chapter is measured against one question: what does this decision mean for what you keep, and for the life you step into afterwards?

The whole sale, in the order you'll live it.

Walk Into Your Sale Knowing the Number You'll Keep

Imagine sitting down with a buyer and knowing exactly what they're paying for. You have more than one offer to choose from. You know which earnout terms you'll accept and which you'll refuse. Your best people are protected in the deal, and you already know what you're doing in the first month after completion.

When the money moves, you open the champagne.

Acquired shows you how to get there, starting with the gap you can fix this week.

How tech services founders can sell their firm
for a price they still keep three years later

You will sell your business once, maybe twice. The buyer's team does this every week. Acquired, by Ian Carpenter, shows you how buyers value a services firm, what to fix years before one looks, and how to negotiate the cash and earnout terms that decide what lands in your account.