I sold my share in a financial planning business for seven figures.

I’d helped build it over years. It won awards. When the deal closed and the money landed, it felt like the end of everything I’d worked toward. A good result. I’d done what I set out to do.

It took me a few years on the other side of it to understand something uncomfortable. If I sold that same share again today, knowing what I now know, I’d walk away with more. Not a little more. Enough that I think about it.

I’m not going to put a figure on the gap. The point is this: I was an award-winning adviser who knew this industry, and I still didn’t get everything I could have out of my own exit. It happened to me, it can happen to you if you haven’t done the work first.

The price is set before you sit down

Here’s what nobody tells the seller, and what I had to learn the hard way: by the time the deal is on the table, the price is mostly decided. Not in the negotiation. In the year, or the three years, before it.

It’s decided by how the book is priced. By who the clients actually are. By what the profit really is once the owners are paid a proper wage. By whether the business can run for a fortnight without any one person in it. Those things are set long before anyone agrees a number, and they are the things that move it. The negotiation is just where you find out what you already built.

These are the four I’d handle differently.

The book gets sorted, whether you’ve sorted it or not

A buyer — internal or external — doesn’t value a book as one number. They sort it. The client list gets split into the clients worth a lot and the clients worth almost nothing.

A client paying $6,000 a year, in their fifties, still accumulating, earns a strong multiple. A client paying $2,500, over seventy, drawing down, is barely wanted, and priced that way. The tail of a book, the clients carried out of loyalty for fifteen years, quietly drags the whole blended multiple down.

If you haven’t done that sort yourself, the person across the table does it for you, in an afternoon, and in their favour. The gap between the number in your head and the number in their spreadsheet is a gap you could have closed in the year before, if you’d known.

The wage you’re not paying yourself

A practice looks profitable right up until the owner is paid a market wage for the work the owner actually does. Put in the salary you’d pay someone to replace yourself, and a lot of “profitable” practices turn out to make very little.

Take a practice clearing $400,000 a year and feeling healthy on it. The two owners are drawing that as profit and calling the business a $400,000 earner. But they’re also doing the work of two senior advisers, and a senior adviser commands around $150,000 in today’s market — the SEEK average sits between $110,000 and $130,000, and senior roles run to $145,000 and beyond. Book those salaries and the real profit isn’t $400,000. It’s $100,000. A buyer values the $100,000, because that’s what’s left once someone’s paid to do the job you’ve been doing for free.

I knew this in theory. I’d have told a client to do it without blinking. Doing it properly to your own numbers, early enough that it changes the value rather than just the conversation, is a different discipline, and it’s the one that most often surprises the owner. Better that you’ve seen that number first, rather than hear it across the table from the person least motivated to be generous about it.

I sold to my partners. That was a choice I didn’t fully make.

I sold my share internally, to my business partners. And an internal sale is a genuinely good outcome in a lot of ways: continuity, a gentle transition for clients, a structure you can live with, a business that survives and keeps serving the people who trusted it. Mine did and still does.

But here’s what I understand now that I didn’t then. Internal and external aren’t two doors to the same room. They’re two different prices, two different structures, two different definitions of what “a good exit” even means. An external sale to a consolidator can mean a higher headline number, paid with earnouts and retention conditions and clawbacks attached. An internal sale usually means a cleaner, lower number and a legacy that lasts.

I’d make the same call again. What I’d change is how I made it. That decision should be a deliberate one, with both numbers on the table, priced against each other — not the path you default into because it’s the one in front of you. I chose my partners.

The number is not what you keep

This is where value quietly leaks. The headline figure is not the same as what ends up yours.

A higher number paid part in cash, part in retained equity, part in an earnout you only collect if the business performs can be worth less than a lower, cleaner figure. The structure is where the money lives or disappears. And a seller doing this for the first time, emotionally invested, relieved that a real number has finally been said out loud, is in no state to see it. That’s not a failing of intelligence. It’s that you do this once, and the people buying do it constantly.

What I do differently now

Two and a half years ago I bought a business in an entirely different world — a bowling alley, pool hall and bar on the Sunshine Coast. A long way from financial advice.

I’ve run it from day one with one eye on what it will sell for. Every decision — the pricing, the numbers, what I pay myself, what lets it run without me — gets made with the eventual exit in mind, even though I’ve no plans to sell it any time soon. Not because I want out. Because I’m not making the same mistake twice.

That’s the difference between knowing something and having lived it. I don’t run that business hoping it’ll be worth a lot one day. I run it backwards from the day it sells, and the value compounds because of it. That discipline isn’t financial-planning knowledge. It isn’t even industry knowledge. It works on any business with a P&L and an eventual buyer. Yours included.

So here’s the question

You spent your career telling clients to prepare, to plan ahead, to not leave money on the table. To get advice before the big decision, not after.

Your stake in your practice is one of the biggest assets you own, and you’ll sell it once. The price is made in the year before you sign, and almost none of that year is hard. It’s repricing the book. It’s cleaning up the tail. It’s paying the owners properly so the numbers tell the truth. It’s choosing your buyer on purpose instead of by accident.

So what else are you doing, if you’re not spending that year maximising your exit?

That’s the work I do now. Not as a broker — I’m not paid when you sell, so I’ve no reason to push you toward a deal that suits me. A fixed fee, twelve months, to get your business into the shape that commands the best the market will pay. Sometimes the honest answer is don’t sell this year, fix these three things first. A broker can’t tell you that. I can, because I’ve already paid for the lessons I’m handing you.