Here's some advice that sounds backwards: run a process to sell your company, even if you have no intention of selling it.
I'm serious. This was a game-changer for Tatango in 2024, and it allowed us to eventually sell the business in 2025. More on this later.
Most founders only think about a sale process when they're ready to exit. That's a mistake. A sale process is one of the most useful diagnostic tools you have.
There are two reasons to run one. The first is obvious. The second is the one that actually matters.
Reason one: you get a real valuation
Running a process forces the market to put a number on your business. Not the number you hope for, not your most recent funding valuation, not the number a banker dangles to win your business. The number serious buyers will actually entertain.
That number is worth a lot on its own. It tells you what you've built so far. It tells you whether this is even the right time to sell. And when you put the valuation next to your forward-looking forecast, you start to see the value you're really creating, year over year.
A quick caveat worth its own post, which I've written before in "Beware the Banker With the Biggest Number": when I talk about a real valuation, I don't mean the number bankers dangle to win your business. I mean the actual number real acquirers are willing to pay, which can only come after running a full process. Don't assume you've hit a real valuation just because the bankers say you should be able to get X for the business.
Reason two: acquirers tell you exactly what's broken
This is the real prize, and it's the part founders never expect.
When you run a process through an investment bank, you get a flood of feedback from potential buyers. A little of it is positive. Most of it is negative. And the negative feedback is gold, because it's free consulting from the exact type of people who would one day acquire your business.
The best part: most of the time, this list of issues costs you nothing. Banks running a sale process for a company our size typically work on a success fee. They get paid a percentage at close and nothing if no deal happens. No deal, no fee. That's exactly what happened to us in 2023. And even if a bank does charge you a retainer or bill you for expenses, the price is trivial next to the value of a detailed list from real buyers telling you what's wrong with your business.
What our "failed" process taught us
In 2024, we ran a process with an investment bank to gauge interest in selling Tatango.
We didn't get a single offer.
If you've never been through that, let me tell you how it feels. No offers basically means nobody wanted to buy the business, and at that point you start thinking, is this business even valuable at all? It's a dark place to be. As an entrepreneur, that's about as deflating as it gets. You pour years into something, you finally test the market, and the market shrugs.
But once we got past the gut punch, that process turned out to be the most valuable thing we did all year, and it set us up for a successful exit in 2025. Because the buyers were remarkably forthcoming about why they weren't interested. They told us, in detail, exactly what they'd need to see before they'd acquire the business. What a godsend. A detailed list from real buyers telling us exactly what they needed from us.
Three things came up over and over from potential acquirers that passed:
Customer concentration. A handful of individual customers made up too much of our revenue.
The politics problem. The vast majority of our revenue came from political customers, and acquirers were nervous about buying a company that leaned that heavily on politics.
Seasonality. We were used to the rhythm of politics and the seasonality that came with election cycles. Buyers weren't.
Commitments. Due to the nature of politics, political customers couldn't commit to anything beyond the month they were currently in, so any commitments like annual contracts were completely off the table.
While some teams may have shrugged off all this free advice, this feedback became a playbook for us. The board's mandate to our CEO at the time, Kevin, was simple: fix these issues so we'd be in a position to actually sell.
Kevin, along with the rest of the team, got to work with the speed of a herd of gazelles, fixing every issue the potential acquirers had raised.
When we went back out to market in 2025, Tatango was almost a completely different business. This time, we received multiple LOIs.
Every one of those offers traced back to the changes we made after that first, "failed" process.
What I recommend
Every few years, run a process with an investment bank to test the waters.
You're testing two things at once: what the business is worth, and what's holding that value back. The first is nice to know. The second is what actually changes your trajectory.
You don't have to sell. You don't even have to act on the feedback. But you, your management team, and your board will walk away with a far clearer picture of what genuinely matters to the people who might one day buy your company.
Run the process. Even if you never plan to sell.