IBA, as the premier business brokerage firm in the Pacific Northwest, is firmly established as a respected professional service firm in the legal, accounting, banking, mergers & acquisitions, real estate, and financial planning communities. Periodically, we will post guest blogs from professionals with knowledge to share for the good of owners of privately held companies & family businesses. The following blog article has been provided by Elijah Fernandez, MSW, PMP, CISSP of CEREVITY (https://cerevity.com/):
Business Sale Stress Doesn’t End at Closing. Plan the Year After
Every exit plan I have seen is thorough about the business. The quality of earnings review, the working capital peg, the tax structure, the transition agreement and the escrow terms each get a specialist and a checklist. The owner gets a congratulations call.
That gap matters more than most sellers expect. Business sale stress does not end when the wire clears. For many owners it changes shape and gets quieter, which makes it harder to see. As co-founder and CTO of CEREVITY, I spend my working life on how high-pressure professionals reach licensed clinicians, and I have come to think therapy after selling your business belongs in the exit plan next to the tax adviser, not as an afterthought a year later.
The numbers sellers rarely hear at the kickoff meeting
The Exit Planning Institute has reported that only 2 out of every 10 businesses that come to market actually sell. Of the owners who do make it to closing, the same organization reported that 75 percent experience what it calls “profound regret” within one year of exiting. That is the group that succeeded.
Regret in that sense is rarely about price. It is about what the company was quietly doing for the owner: giving the week a shape, supplying a reason to be up before the first shift, holding a set of relationships that turn out to have run through a payroll, and answering the question of who you are when someone asks what you do.
The closest well-studied parallel is retirement. In a 2006 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Dhaval Dave, Inas Rashad and Jasmina Spasojevic found complete retirement associated with a 6 to 9 percent decline in mental health over an average post-retirement period of six years. Selling a company you built is not the same event, but it can remove many of the same supports in a single afternoon.
The sale itself is a long-hours exposure
Owners usually enter that year already depleted. A sale process stacks diligence requests, lender questions and buyer meetings on top of running the company, because the business still has to perform through closing. Those months often run well past 55 hours a week, and that threshold is not arbitrary. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that working 55 or more hours a week is associated with a 35 percent higher risk of stroke and a 17 percent higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease.
CEREVITY’s 2026 white paper, The Private Equity Leadership Strain Report, pulls that research together for deal teams and portfolio company leaders. Its central point applies just as well to an owner on the sell side: the hours are an exposure, and the people who perform best under them are usually the last to notice what they are costing.
Five things to settle before you sign
- Write down what the business does for you besides pay you. Structure, status, daily contact with people, a problem worth solving. Each one needs a replacement plan, or at least an honest acknowledgment that it is about to disappear.
- Decide the first 90 days before closing day. Not a five-year vision. A Monday, a Tuesday, and what happens at the hour you used to walk in the door.
- Read your transition role for what it will feel like, not only for what it pays. Staying on under an earnout or a consulting agreement means reporting to the buyer and watching decisions you once made get made differently. Ask your attorney what the agreement requires of you, and ask yourself whether you can live inside it.
- Bring your spouse or partner into the real timeline. Many households are organized around the business without anyone saying so. When both of you are suddenly home, the routines that held the relationship in place are gone too.
- Line up a licensed clinician before you need one. The signs that matter are concrete: sleep that does not come back after closing, drinking that creeps up because evenings have no reason to end, and a flatness that outlasts the first few months. A transition coach or a peer group can help with what comes next. Neither can assess or treat depression, complicated grief or an anxiety disorder.
Why privacy is a practical question for sellers
Sellers still inside an earnout often worry about who might learn they are struggling: the buyer, a new board, the lender, the employees they just handed over. Care paid privately creates no insurance claim and no diagnosis code in a payer system, which removes one of the most common reasons owners give for waiting. What a purchase agreement or an employment agreement asks of you is a question for your own counsel, read against the actual document.
CEREVITY is a private-pay concierge network of independent licensed clinicians built for high achievers: executives, founders, physicians, attorneys and finance leaders. Whichever provider a seller chooses, the questions are the same. Is the clinician licensed? Does the care create a record you did not intend? Does the person across the screen understand what a company can mean to the person who built it?
The buyer is purchasing the company, not you
A clean exit is usually described in terms of the transaction: no surprises in diligence, no clawbacks, no fight over the earnout. The owner deserves the same standard. Plan the year after closing with the seriousness you brought to the year before it. On day one the business has a new steward, and you are still you.
If you have questions relating to the content of this article, Elijah Fernandez, MSW, PMP, CISSP, co-founder and CTO of CEREVITY, would welcome the opportunity to connect. Mr. Fernandez can be reached at (562) 295-6650 and [email protected].
IBA, the Pacific Northwest’s premier business brokerage firm since 1975, is available as an information resource to the media, business brokerage, mergers & acquisitions, and real estate communities on subjects relevant to the purchase & sale of privately held companies and family businesses. IBA is recognized as one of the best business brokerage firms in the nation based on its long track record of successfully negotiating “win-win” business sale transactions in environments of full disclosure employing “best practices”.