What I heard from owners at BTF Toronto
Reflections from the Selling A Business 101 panel at Business Transitions Forum Toronto, May 12, 2026
I sat on the Selling A Business 101 panel at Business Transitions Forum Toronto on May 12, 2026, alongside founder Jennifer Alexander of Thrive Strategy and Lexi Miles Corrin of Sage Collective, who sold WAXON Laser and Waxbar. Linda Martin, a TEC Canada chair, moderated. The session ran 50 minutes. The audience was a room of Canadian business owners and the advisors who work with them.
The panel was framed around a deceptively simple question: you've decided to sell, now what?
What struck me most was not the questions the panel was asked. It was the questions owners asked us in the hallway afterward. Almost every one came back to four things, and they map cleanly onto what the session was built to cover: identifying the right buyer, timing, negotiation and deal structure, and transition planning.
Here is what I took away.
The 'who' is rarely who owners assume
Most owners walk in convinced they know who will buy their company. A competitor down the street. A larger player in the same vertical. The senior manager who has been with them for 15 years.
Sometimes they are right. Often they are not. The strategic buyer who looks obvious on paper may have no acquisition appetite this cycle, or may be a poor cultural fit, or may use diligence to extract information rather than to close. A financial buyer the owner has never heard of may be the better outcome on price, terms and post-close life.
The job of a sell-side process is not to find a buyer. The job is to find the right buyer from a controlled, competitive universe. That is a different problem, and it changes how you prepare.
The 'when' is almost always earlier than owners think
Several owners asked some version of: is now a good time? It is the wrong question. The right question is: am I ready, and is my business ready?
Readiness has two layers. The business needs clean financials, a defensible forecast, a documented operating model, a management team that does not collapse if the owner steps back for a week, and a data room that an institutional buyer can actually work with. The owner needs to know what they want from the next chapter, financially and personally, before the offers start arriving. Both layers take time. Two to three years is realistic. Less than 12 months and you are negotiating from a weaker position.
Market timing matters less than owners fear. Preparation timing matters more than they expect.
The 'how' is where value is made or lost
Negotiation and deal structure was the part of the session where I saw the most note-taking in the room. That tracks with what I see in mandates.
Headline price is the number owners remember. Structure is the number they live with. Earnouts, escrows, working capital adjustments, indemnity caps, holdback periods, reps and warranties, and the tax treatment of the proceeds will all move the real economics of the deal by amounts that often exceed the difference between two competing offers. An offer at $18 million with clean structure can leave more in the owner's pocket than an offer at $20 million with an aggressive earnout and a wide indemnity basket.
This is why a competitive process matters. Not for theatre. For leverage on the terms that determine what the owner actually receives.
Transition planning is the part owners underestimate
The session closed on transition, and so will this post. The hardest week of a sale is not the week the LOI is signed or the week the deal closes. It is the first Monday after close, when the owner who has run the company for 20 or 30 years no longer runs it, and the new owner is making decisions the founder would not have made.
Plan for that Monday. Plan for the year after it. Plan for what you tell your team, when, and in what order. Plan for the relationships, the routines and the identity that the business has carried for you. If you do not plan for it, the deal can close on paper and still feel like a failure.
What I will take into my next conversation with an owner
Three things.
First, the four-part frame from this panel, the right buyer, the right timing, the right structure and the right transition, is the right frame. Use it.
Second, owners are hungry for plain-language guidance. The room at BTF was not asking for jargon. It was asking for the question behind the question.
Third, every owner I spoke to had been thinking about selling for longer than they had been preparing to sell. Closing that gap is most of the work.
Thank you to Linda Martin, Jennifer Alexander and Lexi Miles Corrin for a substantive 50 minutes, and to BTF for putting the conversation in front of the right room.
The Canadian Exit Briefing is the monthly newsletter for Canadian business owners thinking about a future sale and for the advisors who work with them. Each issue takes one chapter of the exit journey and goes deeper than a panel ever can.