%20(2).png)
Scaling with the end in mind: Inside our Exit Readiness Breakfast with Sage
- Jul 3
- 4 min read
Bright and early, a small group of founders and CFOs from across The Founding Network gathered at Sage's Tower Bridge office for a breakfast event on exit readiness - what it actually takes to build a business that's ready for a liquidity event, whenever and however that comes.
Leading the session were Marvin Fletcher Rogers, Principal Consultant at Sage (working across their PE/VC programme and CFO network), and Sean O'Keefe, who's been through the founder journey three times over - one exit, one wind-down, and one walk-away - before landing at Sage's Venture Studio. The room was a genuine mix: subscription DTC, B2C consumer products, B2B SaaS, and a speciality chemicals manufacturer, all at different stages of growth and very different relationships to the word 'exit'.
Here's what came out of it.
Build the metrics infrastructure now, not when someone asks for it
Marvin opened with a simple but uncomfortable observation: Most businesses build their reporting around what they can capture today, not what they'll need to defend in three to five years. The problem isn't the numbers themselves, it's whether you can keep producing them, at the same level of granularity, as the business scales.
If revenue, margin, or unit economics by region, product, or customer segment are the metrics that actually drive your business (and your eventual valuation), you need to be tracking them at that level of detail from early on. Bolting on that depth later, once an investor or acquirer asks for it, is where things fall apart.
The tell, according to Marvin, isn't whether you have a number. Almost everyone does, even if it's living in a spreadsheet. It's what happens when someone asks you to revise or re-cut it. How much scrambling does that trigger? That scramble is the signal of immaturity in the reporting function that due diligence picks up on immediately.
"It's the confidence and defensibility of the numbers, not whether they're impressive, that determines how the room reads you."
Sean's journey: From "What's a P&L?" to embedded finance
Sean's story was one of the session's most candid moments. His first business (a music and events company in Dundee) was successful enough to exit, but by his own account it was run on shoebox receipts and guessed numbers. His second venture, a food supply chain marketplace working with M&S and Tesco, was undone by Brexit margins and then Covid. His third, a comms platform that raised multiple funding rounds, ended with Sean walking away during a stalled raise.
The thread connecting all three, he said, wasn't really about the metrics, it was about the story.
"It's not that companies don't have numbers. It's that the story they're telling with those numbers isn't consistent, and the moment it changes, people notice."
His biggest regret was leaving relationship-building with potential acquirers until far too late. The founders he knows who exited well were having those "what matters to you, what would you actually want from us" conversations while they were fundraising. This is long before any formal process started. By the time Sean's last business needed those relationships, they didn't exist.
His other regret was not bringing in financial expertise earlier. Not a full corporate finance hire, but someone - a fractional CFO or an experienced operator - who could translate the metrics the business already had into the financial story an investor or acquirer needed to hear. "We had numbers. We just didn't have a story that went with them."
That gap is also what led him to Sage's Venture Studio, where he now works on embedding accounting tools directly into business banking products (through partners like Monzo and Tide) - aimed at exactly the early-stage founders who, like he once did, can't justify another £20/month software subscription before they've even opened a business bank account.
B2B vs B2C, EBITDA, and what "exit" even means
The discussion that followed was where things got most interesting and almost divided.
One clear split emerged between B2B and B2C businesses in the room.
For B2B, the consensus was that metrics carry almost all the weight - there's less room for a "fluffy" founder-led story to compensate for the numbers.
For B2C and DTC brands, a strong founder presence and brand story can itself be a source of value, sometimes commanding a premium independent of the underlying metrics.
There was also a useful reframe on EBITDA from the consumer goods founder in the room. For a business with relatively low capex, EBITDA functions as a decent proxy for "the finance we don't want to think about" - useful both internally and as a comparison point for investors, even if it flattens some of the real operational differences between businesses.
Perhaps the most energetic exchange was around what "exit" actually means. Several founders pushed back on the idea that exit has to mean a binary, all-or-nothing sale. This opened to floor for Marvin to point to PISCES - the UK government's new regulatory framework for private intermittent securities trading, now live via the London Stock Exchange's Private Securities Market - as one example of a liquidity mechanism that doesn't require giving up the business: raising capital or taking some money off the table while continuing to run and grow the company.
The framing that landed best in the room was that whether you're aiming for a strategic sale, an IPO, a minority stake sale, or simply want the option to take some chips off the table eventually, the groundwork is the same. Robust numbers, a consistent story, and the right relationships keep every door open and you don't have to decide which door you'll walk through years in advance.
Closing thought
The session closed on a point that resonated across the very different businesses in the room. Whatever your number, metric, or story is, the work is making sure you're always in a position to answer the question when someone asks - whether that's tomorrow, in three years, or never.
As one founder put it, simply:
Lean on your network, because the people in rooms like this one have usually walked a version of this path slightly ahead of you, and that's where a lot of the real answers come from.
Thanks to Marvin, Sean, and everyone who joined us at Sage's Tower Bridge office for an open, sharp, and genuinely valuable conversation.
A full recording of the session will be available to watch soon.
