Most owners decide to sell, then start getting ready. The better sequence is the reverse: decide when you want to complete, then work backwards and ask what has to be true at each point along the way. A sale is not one event but a chain of them, and each link has a lead time you cannot compress once you are in it. Client files take months to remediate. A revenue history takes a full year to look clean. A successor takes longer than that to become credible.
Two years is the comfortable runway. It is not mandatory, and plenty of firms sell well on less, but 24 months is the distance at which every lever is still available to you. At 12 months some levers have gone. At six months you are selling the firm as it stands, and the price will reflect it. The market has been rewarding preparation: Gunner & Co's analysis put the average recurring-income multiple at 4.2x in the first half of 2025, the highest point since 2018, up from a stable level of around 3.5x across 2023 and 2024, and named competition for well-prepared firms as one of the drivers. The premium goes to firms that arrive at market with nothing left to fix.
What follows is the timetable, stage by stage, and then an honest section on what to triage if your runway is shorter.
Months 24 to 18: data, files and revenue
The first six months are unglamorous and they matter more than anything that comes later. Everything a buyer will eventually pay for sits in your back office, and right now it is probably not in a state you would want examined.
Start with the client data. A buyer's first request is almost always a schedule of clients, FUM, and recurring income per client, and the price they offer is only as reliable as that schedule. Duplicate records, dead clients still on the system, plan values that have not been refreshed, missing dates of birth: every one of these becomes a diligence query later, and enough of them become a price chip. The case for doing this early is set out in full in why your data quality determines your price; the short version is that a clean client bank is the single cheapest improvement to your eventual outcome.
File remediation runs alongside. Pull a sample of your own client files and read them the way a buyer's compliance team will: is there a current fact find, a documented ATR, evidence of ongoing service actually delivered, suitability letters that match the advice given? Where the answer is no, fix the file or document why it cannot be fixed. The FCA's expectations of firms selling client banks make plain that the regulator will act where client banks are sold with redress liabilities left behind, and that firms must hold adequate financial resources for potential redress. Buyers read the same page. A file problem discovered by you at month 22 is a remediation project; the same problem discovered by a buyer at month 3 is a warranty, a retention, or a dead deal.
Then tidy the revenue. Buyers pay for recurring income they can verify and expect to keep, so the goal here is a revenue picture that reconciles cleanly: provider statements matching your ledger, ongoing charges matching service agreements, no unexplained one-off spikes propping up the trend. If part of your income is initial or transactional, separate it honestly in your own reporting now, because a buyer will separate it anyway and will trust your numbers more if you got there first. The distinction matters to how you are valued, as covered in recurring income multiples explained.
Months 18 to 12: proposition, platforms and people
With the records honest, the middle year is about making the firm simpler to buy.
Proposition and platform consolidation first. A book spread across seven platforms and four legacy service propositions is harder to integrate, harder to migrate, and therefore worth less than the same FUM sitting on two platforms under one clearly defined service. You do not need to force every client into a single model, and you should not move anyone where the move is not in their interest, but every legitimate consolidation you complete now is integration work the buyer does not have to price in. The FCA's multi-firm review of consolidation, published on Fri 31st Oct 2025, found that poorly managed integration risks poor consumer outcomes; buyers reading that review now have every reason to price integration complexity carefully.
Staff succession is the other job of this year, and it is the one with the longest lead time of all. If the firm's client relationships all route through you, the buyer is not buying a business, they are buying you, and they will structure the deal accordingly: heavier earn-out, longer tie-in, more deferred consideration. Eighteen months is enough time to move meaningful relationships to a second adviser, to give an operations manager real authority, and to let clients experience the firm working without you in the room. Every relationship that survives your absence is risk removed from the buyer's model and money moved from the contingent part of your price to the certain part.
This is also the point to resolve your regulatory structure if it needs resolving. A directly authorised firm and an appointed representative sell differently: an AR's ability to transact can depend on its principal's consent and its network contract, and novation of agency agreements runs on the network's timetable, not yours. Neither status is a bar to selling, but you want to know the mechanics of your own position a year out, not discover them in legals.
Months 12 to 6: accounts, valuation and route
Now the commercial decisions.
Get the accounts into the shape a buyer will read them in. That means a clean set of financials for the most recent complete year, management accounts that reconcile to them, and owner costs normalised so that a stranger can see the firm's true profitability. If you have been running personal expenses through the business or paying yourself substantially over or under market rate, adjust for it visibly. Buyers expect an adjusted EBITDA; a well-presented one signals a well-run firm.
Then the valuation reality check. Before anyone external values the firm, value it yourself, on the same bases a buyer will use, and be honest about which side of each range you sit on. The inputs that raise a multiple and the ones that reduce it are largely knowable in advance, and what raises your multiple walks through them. The purpose of doing this at month 12 rather than month 2 is that some of the answer is still changeable. If client age is dragging the number, or one household is a fifth of your FUM, you cannot fix that in six months, but you can decide how to present it and what price expectation is realistic.
Finally, choose your route, because the route shapes everything downstream. A share sale, an asset sale of the client bank, or a structured asset sale to a national acquirer are different transactions with different tax treatment, different liability positions and different buyer pools; the choice is examined in asset sale or share sale. Tax planning belongs here too, not at the end. As at the 2026-27 tax year, Business Asset Disposal Relief taxes qualifying gains at 18 per cent for disposals from Mon 6th Apr 2026, against a £1 million lifetime limit per person, and rates can change at any Budget. Whether you qualify, and whether your deal structure preserves the relief, is a conversation to have with your accountant while the structure is still negotiable.
Months 6 to 0: market, diligence, legals
The final stretch is execution. Prepare an information pack that answers the first round of buyer questions before they are asked: the client schedule, the revenue analysis, the service proposition, the team, the compliance position. The order in which buyers request things is predictable, and what buyers ask for sets it out; a seller who anticipates the sequence controls the pace.
Go to market deliberately rather than widely. Three or four well-matched buyers examined properly beat a broadcast to twenty. Take indicative offers, compare them on structure as much as headline, and remember that deferred consideration and earn-out terms decide how much of the headline you actually receive. Then diligence, which is where the first eighteen months of this plan pays for itself: a firm that did the remediation early has a quiet diligence, and quiet diligence protects price. Legals move quickest in a clean deal and drag wherever warranties are contested or novation is involved. Expect the whole final stage to take longer than you hope; it nearly always does, and the reasons are covered in how long a sale actually takes.
If you do not have 24 months
Plenty of owners come to this with a health event, a partner's exit, or simple fatigue, and a runway of six to twelve months. The plan compresses, but it does not compress evenly, so triage in this order.
- Client data first: an accurate schedule of clients, FUM and recurring income is non-negotiable at any runway, because it is the basis of every offer.
- File sampling second: you cannot remediate everything, but you can know your exposure before the buyer does and disclose from a position of knowledge.
- Revenue reconciliation third: provider statements to ledger, so the income you claim is the income they verify.
- A realistic price expectation fourth, because the most expensive mistake on a short runway is six months lost to a valuation nobody will pay.
- Everything else, platform consolidation and succession included, becomes the buyer's job and is priced accordingly.
What you give up on a short runway is mostly structure, not the sale itself. Buyers still buy unprepared firms; they just shift more of the price into contingent forms, hold back more against what diligence might find, and tie you in for longer, with retained-income arrangements commonly running many months. The 24-month version of you sells a business; the 6-month version sells a business plus a set of promises about it.
Either way, the starting point is the same: a clear-eyed number for what the firm is worth today, before any of the work begins, so you can measure what the preparation is adding. If you want a figure of your own to react to, the free IFA valuation calculator gives you a range and explains the factors affecting it, using the same inputs a buyer would start from. The rest of the getting sale ready pillar takes each stage of this plan in more detail.