If you’ve ever built or advised a small business, you know how much life, passion, and risk gets poured into it.
Maybe you own a small business yourself, or maybe you’re an advisor to small business owners. Maybe you’ve been running a business for a couple years, or a few decades. Your life’s work is likely wrapped up in it. It fuels your desire to get out of bed in the morning and provides value to your community, livelihoods to your employees, and security for your family.
One day, possibly today or maybe in a few years, it’ll be time to leave that business behind.
You may not be thinking about that day yet. Or maybe it’s coming faster than you thought. But eventually, every owner faces a simple, unavoidable question:
Are you ready?
For most small business owners, the answer is “no”.
Yet planning for, and executing on, a successful exit is one of the greatest challenges that will be faced by established small business owners.
Many small business owners are more focused with working “in” the business, rather than “on” the business. They’re doing what they love, but they open their doors without an exit strategy—and without a plan for what happens if they can’t keep going. Many of these small business owners end up selling to private equity or liquidating their business. Even more end up sacrificing a hard-earned slice of the value they’ve built to brokers who are more concerned with their own profits than perpetuating the business’ legacy.
In short, the exit industry is out of alignment with the needs and challenges of small business owners.
Like many, I’ve been around small businesses my entire life. I’ve worked at them, have family members who own them, and I’ve helped guide others as they’ve launched theirs. I’ve seen successful exits, unfortunate failures, and pivots where they’re still fighting to find their footing.
One thing all these small businesses have in common, though, is serving as the backbone of the communities they’re in. A rich, diverse fabric of people making a go of a dream - their dream, their family’s dream, the American dream - lifts the collective strength of communities.
Creating advantageous exits is about making communities strong and resilient while providing benefits to a diverse set of people - including those who are just setting out in owning a business for the first time.
When exits go well, communities are stronger. Businesses keep operating, jobs stay local, and wealth circulates. When they don’t, we lose more than a storefront—we lose a piece of what defines us.
It’s an impactful problem, but also a timely one. Over the next several years, we’re going to see the largest ever transfer of wealth in our nation’s history - the so-called “Silver Tsunami”. With 40% of the 33 million small business owners set to retire, we’re already seeing an explosion in small business sales. Even then, AI, changing economic forces, and new ideas around business marketing and optimization will completely disrupt the status quo. We aim to approach these problems with respect towards the small business owners who have gotten these businesses to where they’re at while ushering in a new era of meaningful small business ownership.
In the dozens of conversations we’ve had with small business owners, we know that despite their “roll up my sleeves” attitude, they don’t want to go through an exit in a vacuum. They want the support of their closest advisors, mentors, coaches, and peers.
ella is a workbench that enables exit planning advisors to deepen their relationships with small business owners who are preparing for exit by illustrating the value of their business and building a shared roadmap through the exit process.
We do this by:
We’re not building another brokerage or a self-service tool. We’re betting on the power of the advisor-owner relationship—because trust, not transactions, drive advantageous exits.
We’re making the exit process more efficient, collaborative, and centered on the small business owner, while keeping the advisor at the helm. By strengthening the advisor-owner relationship, ella not only improves exit outcomes for SBOs but also creates new opportunities for advisors to deepen their value and expand their services.
Even in our early market tests, we’ve helped advisors guide real owners through funding, succession, and transitions. We’ve engaged with advisors of varied backgrounds and helped SBOs gain funding, perpetuate their businesses, and help future SBOs achieve their own dreams.
If we get this right, small business owners won’t just exit—they’ll perpetuate. Advisors will expand their impact. And a new generation of owners will step into businesses that are healthy, thriving, and built to last.
It’s time to ellavate your exit.
