A quicker process means better results when selling your business
If you’re selling your company, time is not your friend. Every extra day spent in a deal process carries hidden risks, which can endanger a transaction.
In short, the old saying in the M&A world is as true as ever: time kills deals.
What’s also true is that preparation can save deals.
I speak from experience: my team and I have guided more than 100 entrepreneurs through their transactions, and preparation is the theme that runs through every successful deal. Well-prepared companies sail through processes quicker than their less prepared counterparts. Our Elevate Your Valuation report shows that clients who underwent a pre-sale advisory program closed their deals 38 days faster than those who didn’t.
But before discussing how you can use prep to shave time off deals, let’s discuss why and how time can hurt or even kill them.
To the swift go the spoils
When timelines drag on in a transaction process, it can cause a lot more than frustration. There are real costs to a deal moving too slowly. Buyers hate surprises, so they often throw an army of people into each due diligence period they undertake.
An extended diligence process with an unprepared seller can surface more questions, which breeds more doubt. The buyer may then try to renegotiate the original terms or valuation in their favor or simply walk away if not satisfied. Both outcomes are disheartening and expensive to any seller, who will have hired advisors and taken time away from the business to prepare for market and negotiate with bidders.
In addition, the more time spent on a transaction, the more that outside forces can torpedo a good deal: market conditions could change, the macroeconomic picture can shift, or competitors can surface news that cause the buyer to rethink their position.
That’s why less time spent in an M&A process is usually better for sellers.
The hidden toll
All of this has just focused on the business side, but any M&A process also takes an emotional toll on a seller. The longer a transaction lasts, the more stress and fatigue starts to set in, especially during the rapid-fire trial of due diligence.
M&A deals often last well over 200 days from start to close (Elevate Your Valuation report, 2026). That’s a long time to keep a company running at top performance while also managing a rigorous sale process. Emotional stamina is a finite resource, and distracted leadership can mean the business doesn’t hit its numbers. This can lead to the buyer revising their offer downward—after all, they’re paying for future performance, which suddenly seems shaky. These cycles only compound the mental toll on the owner.
Eventually, the seller may become so overwhelmed that they decide to accept a suboptimal result they wouldn’t have dreamed of a few months before.
How M&A preparation compresses the calendar
What’s the best way to avoid this vicious cycle? Systematically prepare your business for sale.
Prepared companies are more likely to enter diligence with clean financials, organized documentation, and a clear growth narrative. All these things reduce the seemingly endless back-and-forth that causes the timeline to stretch, because buyers can access what they need more quickly and with fewer questions.
Class VI has defined a framework we use to prepare sellers for the M&A market: the Value Creation Formula. The Formula’s four components—executive team, credible growth story, operational excellence, and financial strength and transparency—are the areas that buyers scrutinize most, so working to improve these areas tends to shorten your company’s time in the cauldron.
Start preparing today
Spending 38 fewer days to close your deal is the result of upfront work paying off at the back end. Every extra week in process is another week for market conditions to shift, buyer confidence to erode, and emotional fatigue to push you into accepting terms you never would have considered at the outset.
If you’re close to a sale, preparation is the highest-leverage investment you can make. Scrutinize your business according to the Value Creation Formula. (Tools like Class VI’s free Compass assessment can help!). Because the sellers who close fastest are the most prepared.
AUTHORED BY:
Chris Younger | CEO | Class VI Securities, LLC | Class VI Family Office, LLC
Chris co-founded Class VI in 2005 with a mission to Enable the Entrepreneurial Spirit. Sharing a passion for what entrepreneurs mean to our community, Chris and his business partner David Tolson felt they could do a better job for business owners and have had a great time helping clients ever since.
Prior to Class VI, Chris spent more than 20 years gaining experience in executive management, marketing, sales, law, and mergers and acquisitions.