The 4E’s, of the EXIT Readiness Program, start the path to envision the future for yourself, after the business, evaluate your resources, so you know what you currently have, examine what to let go of, and establish the resources needed to begin the transition. I use the word ‘transition’ because making a decision to create a business that you can sell in the future, is a change that will affect not only what you do in the business, but also how the business will run, and how you and your people will interact with the business. Like all change, the process is not immediate, and it needs to be understood, appraised, audited, and the assets found to make it happen.

The 4E’s Stage in EXIT Readiness

When we need to make changes, there are also things that need to be addressed, because change can cause stress, emotional upset, and resistance. The last thing you need, while you are trying to implement change and run a business, is to experience overwhelming stress, conflicts, or push-back, both from within yourself and from within your team.

The best way through change is to start with these 4Es.

Envision – Spending time to envision your future is important. I don’t mean the future of your business, but YOUR future. What will you be doing after you sell the business? If you cannot visualize this, with a desire to want it, you cannot easily make it happen. Desire for an outcome helps fill you with the motivation needed to make that happen. Later, in the EXIT process, this understanding and desire will also need to be taken on by your team.

Evaluate – We use a process that starts with identifying all the roles, responsibilities, and tasks that both you, as the owner do, and that of your team. This helps us look critically at the time resources you have as well as what responsibilities the business relies on from you, to help determine what assets and liabilities are already in the business. Knowing that the business relies heavily on you for some aspects of the operations, in a way that cannot be filled by anyone else, starts the conversation around how these roles can be filled by someone else. After all, you cannot sell a business where you are the product, and you definitely don’t want to be working for someone else, in the business you built (unless that is your ultimate future vision).

Examine – After you have accounted for all your assets in time, the process of determining what you will let go of first, and next, is started. Start by asking questions around letting go. For example, “How can I let go of the management of my people?” or “What would someone else need to know to be able to work directly with the clients?”. Your answers will help you decide what you could do first. For instance: if someone on your team would need to have a certification to be able to work with your clients, then this may not be the first thing you can let go of. But you might have someone that is already doing some of the management work. You could start with handing off some management responsibility as the first steps towards your change.

Establish – Once you have an idea of which responsibilities you can let go of, some of which may be easy, and some may take months or years, you can start to list the resources needed:

• Regulatory training for employee X
• Hire a part time bookkeeper
• Account for my time to create procedures that I can train my manager on.
• etc.

You do know all this work, because you did it when you originally set up your business. But, as the adage goes, “You cannot see the label from inside the jar.” We cannot see all our challenges without first knowing the path we need to walk on. We may avoid something, like training your manager to do more, because it feels like it takes more effort than it will offset.

Obviously, this article’s description of the process is not as easy or simple as it will be in real life. It may require conversations with your accountant or lawyer. It may require you to spend a lot of time on, or pay for research. Your expectations of others may differ from their actual response, later on in the process.

What is important to know is, that spending time to truly know and understand your destination, the assets, the options, and expenses to help get you there, will be the only way you will arrive at your expected outcome.

This article is 100% original content – The articles you read in this blog are 100% created by Barb Stuhlemmer, not by AI. © 2025 Barb Stuhlemmer