Fact-finding is the starting line of a smart exit strategy. It’s where advisors begin helping business owners discover their business’s current and future value and marketability.

To help advisors and business owners get across the finish line, ELLA integrated AI into a fact-finding workbench. This workbench equips exit teams with intuitive tools to illustrate value and preserve the craft of advising.

Simply put, ELLA empowers trusted advisors to guide business owners through one of their most critical transitions. Or, in the words of ELLA’s founder, Drew Watkins, “ELLA exists to make simple exits faster and complex exits simpler.”

If you’re an advisor and that all sounds pretty good, we invite you to pour yourself a cup of coffee and read more about what Watkins sees as AI’s role in the future of fact-finding and exit planning as a whole.

Augmenting The Craft

AI shouldn’t be a tool for automating an advisor's role but rather augmenting their craft. “AI will support advisors who care about client relationships, purpose, and communication, and using AI will augment their work, not replace it,” notes Watkins. “On the other hand, advisors without that depth could be commoditized.”

People love making predictions about the future of AI. But really, at the current rate of development, forecasting even five years out is difficult, if not impossible. However, in the near term, AI will shift focus toward data accessibility and democratization—at the very least, that’s ELLA’s vision. “Instead of paying for closed, curated datasets, advisors can lean on large language models (LLMs) to aggregate across the broader corpus of human knowledge, pulling both quantitative and qualitative insights.”

AI can generate highly nuanced explanations of global, national, regional, and even local industry drivers. Just a few years ago, these insights required expensive expert analysis and paid data sets. Now, they’re widely accessible. That said, sure, the data’s out there, but that doesn’t mean it always makes things clearer. AI-augmented exit planning will require the right prompting, a strong governance framework, and advisor-guided fine-tuning.

“We’re layering in AI only where it adds clarity: making sense of data, meetings, and documents,” Watkins points out. “It won’t replace advisors—it will amplify their craft and speed up the process.” Through ELLA’s workbench, advisors can coordinate exit teams, structure information, and support client relationships without losing autonomy and oversight.

Quantifying Qualitative Value

Traditional valuation methods like SDE, EBITDA, and DCF will continue to be fundamental, even in the wake of AI. In the same way that you can’t outrun a bad diet, advisors can’t help business owners prompt their way out of bad financials. But AI could impact the qualitative side of valuations: multiples.

“Multiples are subjective and negotiable,” Watkins points out. “AI can inform those discussions with a broader context.” In fact, Watkins asserts that LLMs will likely help businesses quantify intangibles, such as their brand and reputation, through real-time social listening, search volume, and online conversation analysis. “LLMs can provide near-instant insights into brand perception, management team reputation, and qualitative factors that once required expensive studies.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, AI can boost productivity across just about every industry and sector. The problem is, if you’re not careful, it can create some major quality deficits—and this couldn’t be truer in the fact-finding phase of exit planning. “LLMs produce accurate, context-rich insights, while others sound authoritative but drift into irrelevant generalizations,” Watkins remarks. “Advisors will need to guard against hallucinations and context-switching errors that could misrepresent the business.”

Sparking a Renaissance

AI is arguably the most consequential technology in history, and with it comes unprecedented and unpredictable opportunities. When asked what excites him most about AI, Watkins is encouraged by the competitive edge it could give small businesses.

“AI could spark a small business renaissance,” he says. “With AI handling complex tasks, small firms may compete more effectively with larger players, reviving Main Street entrepreneurship.”

Because they operate with smaller teams and tighter budgets, small businesses can turn to AI to improve efficiency and unlock new growth opportunities by automating repetitive tasks, making smarter data-driven decisions, improving their marketing, and saving costs through inventory forecasting.

Using ELLA To Build The Exit Plan

From mechanic shops to IP-heavy start-ups, fact-finding remains the most critical step in exit planning. The challenge is working through the arduous process of manually gathering and analyzing critical information about a business and its owners.

ELLA turns an advisor's cumbersome fact-finding documents into an intuitive interface. Throughout the process, it provides hints, benchmarks, and industry context. This guidance helps advisors refine their valuation, but doesn’t replace their judgment. Likewise, every valuation factor connects back to fact-finding inputs. But at the end of the day, it’s up to the advisor to make the final call.

Additionally, advisors can generate custom reports right from the workbench, assign tasks to people on the exit team, and track progress on those tasks. “ELLA’s niche is empowering advisors with better tools, making exits faster and simpler while preserving the human art of valuation,” asserts Watkins. “The workbench isn’t about automation for automation’s sake. It’s about craft.”