Most founders only start thinking about business exit planning once a buyer is on the table. By then, the shareholder structure, the succession plan and the person meant to run things afterwards are all being figured out under pressure, at the worst possible time.
Dan Maudhub, of branding agency Be Wonderful found that out the hard way, twice over. He built the agency from scratch, then sold it via an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) roughly a year ago. What he learned before, during and after that sale is a useful map for any founder thinking about selling a business, whatever route they eventually choose.
Get your shareholder structure sorted years before you sell
Good business exit planning starts with ownership, not with a buyer. Dan didn’t start Be Wonderful as sole owner. A former boss, a creative director and a small advisory shareholder all held stakes early on. Over several years, he bought each of them out individually, a process that took time, money and, by his own account, a fair bit of patience.
That decision, made long before any sale was on the horizon, turned out to matter more than anything else in the eventual transaction. As he put it:
“You do start with the end in mind.”
Avoiding misaligned expectations
Clean ownership meant Dan controlled the vision, avoided boardroom deadlock as the agency pivoted digital-first, and, crucially, didn’t have to negotiate an exit with shareholders who wanted different outcomes. If you’re a co-founder or majority shareholder still sharing decisions with other stakeholders, this is worth confronting now rather than at the point of sale, because misaligned shareholders can cause an exit to stall or become considerably more difficult.
The alignment question extends to spouses too. Dan’s wife was a fellow majority shareholder, and he credits their honesty about numbers, specifically agreeing they had to be satisfied with whatever they took off the table on day one, as the deciding factor in choosing the EOT route over a trade sale that might have paid more over three years. That kind of clarity, reached before negotiations begin rather than during them, is what separates a considered exit from a reactive one.
Employee Ownership Trusts: one exit route worth understanding
An EOT works by transferring a controlling stake (more than 50%) in the business to a trust held for the benefit of all employees, similar in structure to the John Lewis Partnership. For Dan, it solved a specific problem he’d seen play out with peers who’d exited via trade sale: three-year earn-outs where founders become, in his words, “glorified salespeople” chasing targets they no longer fully control.
A longer horizon
Instead of a three-year earn-out, Dan took on a five-year run-out tied to the business continuing to generate profit without him. It also came with real preparation: six months working with a specialist EOT advisory firm, and a valuation process that has to be demonstrably fair to all parties rather than pushed as high as a trade sale valuation often is. Much of that preparation overlaps with what any buyer or trustee will want to see, which is exactly the ground covered in our guide to what due diligence actually involves. As lawyer Paul Bevington puts it on a related episode of the show, delay is the enemy of any transaction, EOT or otherwise, and the founders who prepare early are the ones who move through it fastest.
Using an EMI scheme
An EOT isn’t the only way to give a team a stake in the business either. Where full ownership transfer doesn’t fit, some founders use share options through an EMI scheme instead, which reward key people without handing over control of the company.
The tax relief on offer has also become less generous for anyone weighing this route now. Capital Gains Tax relief on EOT disposals was cut from 100% to 50% for disposals made on or after 26 November 2025, so the tax position Dan describes reflects the rules at the time of his own sale rather than what a founder selling today would receive.
The real risk in exit planning: succession and handover
Succession is the part of business exit planning most founders leave until last, and it’s usually where things unravel. Where Dan’s planning fell short was the handover itself. He promoted his creative director to MD, having worked alongside him for nine months beforehand. On paper, it looked ready.
In practice, margins slipped over the following months, support had to be outsourced more than expected, and profitability declined. Gross profit on individual projects and the overall EBIT figure both fell as the extra outsourcing costs stacked up, and the pressure fed on itself. The more the numbers slipped, the harder the MD found the role. The board extended his probation before the two sides reached what Dan calls a “relatively mutual decision” to part ways in May, once it was clear the agreed targets weren’t being met. Dan’s own assessment was blunt:
“Someone who’s a good 2IC doesn’t necessarily make a good 1IC.”
Changing skillsets
Being a strong second-in-command, executing well against someone else’s direction, is a different skill from setting that direction yourself and owning the calls with no one above you to share them with. Dan’s creative director had excelled at the first. The MD role demanded the second.
The deeper issue wasn’t the individual. It was that years of shared, intuitive decision-making between Dan and his team had never been written down anywhere. When Dan stepped back, those decisions had no documented process to fall back on. His advice for anyone preparing a handover:
“Being really, really brutal and honest about what you carry, how you do it and where the pitfalls in processes and systems are.”
That MD role was eventually vacated in May this year, and Dan is now spending more time back at the agency training the wider team to absorb what one person previously carried alone. It’s a pattern echoed by other founders on the show, including Elliott King’s account of what actually changes after selling an agency, where the same gap between owning a decision and documenting it shows up again after completion.
A CFO’s Perspective
We see this pattern regularly in our client work: founders who treat business exit planning as a transaction to prepare for, and the handover as something that will sort itself out. It rarely does. Sorting out who owns what and getting the deal terms right both matter, but so does documenting the decisions that currently live only in the founder’s head. This is exactly where a fractional CFO earns their keep, building the reporting and cash flow discipline a buyer or trust expects to see well before a transaction starts. On the EOT route specifically, the 50% CGT relief now available still makes it a genuinely tax-efficient option worth modelling against a trade sale, provided the business can sustain profitability without its founder driving every call.
One book worth your time
Dan’s pick for founders thinking about exit is Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, a book he says shaped how he thought about building long-term wealth rather than relying on salary, and reinforced the discipline of retaining profit in the business in the years before his own sale. It’s not a book about exits specifically, but the underlying principle, that wealth comes from what you build and retain rather than what you draw as income, ran through several of the decisions he made along the way.
Prepare for the exit you haven’t planned yet
Whichever route a founder eventually takes, the groundwork is the same: aligned shareholders, honest and verifiable numbers, and a team that can run the business without you in the room. Dan’s experience shows that preparation pays off long before a buyer or a trust ever appears.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is business exit planning?
Business exit planning is the process of preparing a company’s ownership structure, financial systems and leadership team for an eventual sale or transfer, ideally years before a transaction is on the table. It covers shareholder alignment, succession planning and documenting decision-making processes.
What is an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT)?
An EOT is a trust structure that acquires a controlling interest (51–100%) in a trading company for the benefit of all employees. It’s one of several routes for selling a business, alongside trade sales and management buyouts, and offers Capital Gains Tax relief to selling shareholders.
How much CGT relief is available on an EOT sale in 2026?
Since 26 November 2025, EOT disposals qualify for 50% Capital Gains Tax relief rather than the previous 100% exemption, following changes announced in the Autumn 2025 Budget. Founders should take current professional tax advice before relying on any specific figure.
Why do business handovers often fail after an exit?
Handovers commonly struggle because a founder’s decision-making knowledge is rarely documented. When the founder steps back, the incoming leader lacks the systems and context to make the same calls, which can affect margins and profitability in the months after a sale.
