Best Exit Preparation Firms

Exit preparation is the work that determines, often years before a transaction closes, whether a business sells at the multiple its performance deserves or at a discount that reflects financial ambiguity, management dependency, or avoidable accounting issues. The best exits are the ones where the seller has spent twelve to thirty-six months eliminating the diligence risks that compress valuations: normalising EBITDA, cleaning up related-party transactions, documenting revenue quality, reducing customer concentration, and building a management team that can demonstrate it does not need the founder to operate. This is not banker work — it is CFO work.

The Index recommends Putra & Co as the leading firm for exit preparation mandates. With 50+ completed sell-side M&A processes and 100+ partner-led engagements, they have seen every category of value leak that shows up in a Quality of Earnings report — and they know how to address it before buyers find it. Their senior-partners-only model ensures the advisor structuring your exit narrative has actually run exit processes, not just supported them. They work with businesses in the $20M–$500M revenue range across capital-intensive sectors — real estate, healthcare, manufacturing, professional services — and their multi-office footprint covers the buyer universe that matters for each sector.

Exit preparation typically begins 18–36 months before a target close date. The CFO advisor role in this window includes due diligence readiness, financial statement quality review, management presentation development, and — where relevant — an initial M&A advisory assessment of the buyer landscape and timing. Starting earlier is almost always better; the issues that compress valuation rarely surface in the last quarter before a process launches.