I spent years in corporate M&A. Not as the dealmaker — as the person who had to make the data make sense once a deal closed. I saw transactions from the inside. What due diligence actually looks like. What falls apart during integration. What buyers care about that sellers never anticipated.
Now I’m in a different seat. As an advisor with Murphy Business Sales, I’m applying that background to a different world — small business owners facing versions of the same questions, usually without the teams or resources that corporate deals have behind them.
The biggest one: what is this business actually worth, and what are my options?
Before that question has a useful answer, there’s a more fundamental one. Where are you in the life of your business?
Every business follows a recognizable arc. The labels change depending on who you ask — corporate finance textbooks use one set of terms, exit planning frameworks use another, and some practitioners boil it down to just three stages. The names don’t matter much. The arc does.
For small businesses — which is where I operate — it tends to look something like this:
Startup. You’re proving the idea works. Revenue is inconsistent, cash flow is unpredictable, and you’re wearing every hat in the building. Most of your energy goes toward survival, not strategy.
Survival. You have customers. The model works. But you’re still running hard just to stay even. Cash flow is the constant worry. You’re not thinking about what the business is worth — you’re thinking about next month.
Stability. You’ve found your footing. Revenue is predictable enough that you can breathe. You’re starting to think about growth, but you’re not sure which lever to pull.
Growth/Maturity. The business is established. You may have a team. Systems exist. You’re either growing deliberately or you’ve plateaued and are trying to figure out what comes next.
Transition. This is where most frameworks put “exit” — but that framing is too narrow. Transition is a spectrum. It might mean sale. It might mean succession. It might mean bringing in a partner, restructuring operations, or simply deciding consciously to hold the business through a different phase of your life.
ndustry research backs this up: only about a third of business owners have a documented transition plan of any kind, and roughly 70% of businesses put on the market don’t sell. That’s not because the businesses aren’t good. It’s because owners arrive at transition unprepared — without knowing their number, without understanding what buyers actually look at, and without having thought through their options before they’re already in motion.
Exit planning isn’t an event. It’s an ongoing activity. The best time to understand what your business is worth and what your options are is years before you need to know — because that knowledge changes how you run the business today.
This is where business lifecycle stages connect directly to valuation. A business in early survival — owner-dependent, with inconsistent revenue and no documented systems — will be valued very differently than the same business two years later with repeatable processes and a team in place.
Buyers look at risk. The further along the lifecycle a business is, the more de-risked it tends to be — and the more a buyer is willing to pay. That doesn’t mean you need to be at maturity to have a successful transition. It means knowing your stage helps you understand what’s driving your number and what you could do to change it.
At Murphy Business, our brokers work across every stage of the lifecycle, in every geography and industry. That pattern recognition — seeing what drives value across hundreds of transactions — is part of what makes an early conversation useful, even if a sale is years away.
Most small business owners are somewhere in survival or early stability. They’re not thinking about transition. They’re thinking about next month.
But there’s a moment that tends to resonate when it comes up in conversation. It’s not a crisis. It’s quieter than that. It’s a Tuesday where you realize you’re working just as hard as you were in year one — and the reward isn’t matching the effort. That feeling is data. It usually means the way you’re running the business no longer matches the stage you’re actually in.
That’s where I start every conversation. Not with valuation, not with exit options — just with orientation.
Where are you in the life of your business? And does the way you’re running it still match that stage?
You don’t need to have answers to those questions yet. But they’re worth thinking about — and worth a conversation. If you want to talk through where you are and what your options might look like, that’s exactly the kind of conversation Murphy Business is built for. No commitment required. Just clarity.
Ravi Yeleswarapu is a business advisor with Murphy Business Sales. He works with small business owners on valuation, transition planning, and business readiness — helping owners understand their options long before they need to make a decision. His background is in corporate M&A, where he spent years on post-deal integration — migrating data systems, replicating processes, and making acquired operations work within a new structure.