The True Logistics Behind Selling Your Business
Insights from Evergreen’s investing team
Selling a business, you’ve built from the ground up is one of the most consequential decisions you’ll ever make. There’s no shortage of buyers ready to tell you what you want to hear. But the process entails more than a polished pitch deck and a handshake.
We’ve done this more than 160 times. Here’s what we’ve learned about what makes a sale go well, from the first conversation to closing day and beyond.
There’s No Single Timeline
The process can take five weeks or five years. Both are completely valid outcomes.
Some owners aren’t ready to sell today, but they want to understand what a partnership with the right buyer could look like down the road. We’re built for that. We’re not a fund with a return clock ticking. We’re a permanent capital company, which means we have patience that most buyers simply don’t.
Building a relationship before you’re ready to transact is not a waste of time, it’s often how the best deals happen.
What to Do Before You’re Even in a Process
If you’re starting to think seriously about a sale, even a year or two out, there are a few things worth getting in order now.
Get legal representation. Have someone in your corner whose only job is to represent your interests. We’re happy to share a list of counsel who know this space well if that’s helpful.
Think about the tax implications. This will likely be the largest financial event of your life. The sooner you engage a tax advisor to understand what that means for you personally, the better positioned you’ll be when the time comes.
Clean up your financials. Whether you have a full-time CFO or a trusted outside bookkeeper, make sure your books are accurate, well-organized, and defensible. This is the single biggest lever in a smooth diligence process.
And the most important thing: don’t change how you run your business. The reason we’re talking is because you’ve built something good. Keep doing what you’re doing.
The Early Stages: Getting to Know Each Other
The first step is a conversation. We want to understand your business, your goals, and what matters to you. And you should be asking hard questions of us, too. Diligence goes both ways.
If we see a mutual fit, we’ll ask for a small initial data set: a few months of financials, anonymized customer data, and an org chart. That’s usually enough for us to come back within a week with a view on valuation and deal structure.
If the numbers and the vision align, we move to a Letter of Intent. That document becomes the foundation for everything that follows, so we work hard to make sure it reflects what both sides need.
Know What You Want Before You Sign Anything
This sounds obvious. It’s harder than it sounds.
The sellers who have the most difficult time in a deal process are often the ones who haven’t spent real time thinking through what they’re actually looking for. It’s a massive decision with a lot of variables.
But before you go too far down the road with any buyer, get clear on a few things:
Every buyer will treat your business differently. The right one will actually care about the answers to these questions.
Diligence: Expect 45–60 Days of Real Work
Formal diligence is intensive. It’s worth going in with clear expectations.
Quality of Earnings. This is the most rigorous piece. A thorough review of your financial statements by experienced accounting advisors. It’s the closest thing to a mini-audit of your business. We use the same firm on every deal, and they’ve completed 50+ transactions with us. They know the MSP space. They know ERP. They know how Evergreen works. You won’t be explaining what a managed services agreement is.
Legal diligence. This covers both the review of your existing contracts, agreements, and compliance posture, as well as the drafting and negotiation of the transaction documents themselves. Your counsel and ours will do most of the heavy lifting here.
Market and customer diligence. We bring in advisors who survey your customers to build a clear, independent picture of your business from the outside in.
Management meetings. Alongside the formal diligence, we’ll spend real time with you and your leadership team, ideally in person. We want to understand your business deeply: your people, your processes, your customers, your culture. The goal is to build the most growth-oriented transition plan possible, not just to check boxes.
What We’re Building Together During Diligence
Diligence isn’t just about validating the past. It’s about planning for the future.
By the end of the process, we want to have a clear picture of how we double the revenue of your business. How we double the earnings. And how we do it in a way that’s sustainable, one that respects the foundation you’ve built.
The reason owners choose to partner with Evergreen isn’t just liquidity. There are plenty of ways to get that. They choose us because they believe we’ll take care of what they built: the customers, the team, the culture. And because they want a partner who’s genuinely invested in growth, not one who’s already planning the exit.
Closing Day
Closing day is quieter than most people expect.
You’ll get on a call with the deal stakeholders, walk through the final legal steps, and then it’s done. There are real emotions in that room. This is the culmination of years of work and a major decision about your future.
Then most people go back to their day.
There’s no big blowout. People celebrate in their own way. What tends to be true is that the business keeps running, your team is still there, and the work you built continues, now with a permanent partner behind it.
We have a seller NPS of 93. The reason, when we ask, is almost always the same: Evergreen did what they said they would do.
That’s the standard we hold ourselves to.