S 01 | Ep 24 The Most Effective Strategies for Small Business Owners in the M & A Market This episode is a useful corrective to a lot of the noise around exits , valuations , and what it actually means to build a sellable business . Thomas ' s core argument is simple and worth repeating : the best thing you can do to maximize your exit options is to build a genuinely good business , not one that has been engineered to look attractive on a spreadsheet . Thomas covers what the current M & A environment actually looks like for smaller businesses , which turns out to be more stable than headlines suggest . The slowdown has been concentrated in large deals , while profitable businesses under one hundred million in value still have significant buyer demand , including from private equity firms that have started looking at smaller transactions they would have dismissed two years ago . There is also a discussion on the specific ways businesses become unsellable , and the most common culprit is not bad strategy but complacency . A business that coasts on a single channel , underinvests in team , and avoids the hard work of managing people tends to plateau and then quietly decline . By the time the owner wants to sell , the window has often closed .