How long does an exit take?

How long does an exit take?

Nobody can give you an honest average, and anyone who quotes one is describing their own situation rather than yours. What can be described precisely is the work: five stages, each with its own driver, and each one capable of taking days or months depending on decisions you make before a buyer ever appears. This page describes the shape of that process. Nothing here is a measured outcome, and Indiemaker does not publish time-to-close figures.

The useful reframing is that an exit is not a waiting period. It is a sequence of tasks, most of which you can do before listing, and the founders who find it quick are the ones who did that work in advance.

Why does the answer vary so much?

Four variables account for nearly all the variation: how prepared the numbers are, how quickly each side responds, how deep the buyer takes diligence, and how complicated the stack is to move. None of them are about market conditions. All of them are visible before you list, which means you can predict roughly where your own exit will sit on each one.

Responsiveness is the underrated one. A diligence exchange that could take four days takes three weeks when replies arrive every other Friday, and the delay is nobody's strategy. It is just two busy people.

What are the stages, and what drives each?

The stages are consistent even when their durations are not.

Read that table as a description of the work rather than as a timetable. The first stage is the one that shortens the other four.

Which stages can you compress?

Preparation and diligence compress dramatically, and they compress for the same reason. Every question a buyer asks in diligence is a question you could have answered in advance with a document, so the material you assemble before listing is effectively diligence done early. A buyer who receives a profit and loss, an asset schedule, twelve months of processor data and operating documentation in one folder spends their time deciding rather than extracting.

Agreement compresses less, because it depends on a lawyer with their own diary. You can help by having the asset schedule finished, since that is the part of the document that usually stalls.

What reliably makes it slower?

Five things slow an exit more than anything else, and four of them are in the seller's hands:

1. Revenue that cannot be reconciled at source, which turns diligence into an audit.
2. An asset schedule assembled during diligence rather than before it, which delays both agreement and transfer.
3. Personal accounts embedded in the stack, each one needing a workaround at transfer.
4. Slow replies, which multiply through every stage of the process.
5. A buyer who was never qualified, which costs the whole cycle and returns nothing.

Payment processor migration deserves a mention of its own. Processor accounts are generally not transferable, so subscriptions have to be migrated between accounts through the provider's own path, and that path has a lead time you cannot argue with. Start it early.

What cannot be rushed?

Diligence at this size cannot be rushed, and you should be wary of a buyer who wants to. Someone committing $50,000 to $150,000 needs to see the processor, reconcile it against the bank, understand churn and satisfy themselves about how much of the business depends on you. A buyer proposing to skip that is either not serious or planning to renegotiate later.

The same applies to anyone pressing you to complete before funds are committed, or suggesting the amount be paid in parts over time. Transfers in this band run on clean, upfront completion, and pressure to deviate from that is a reason to slow down rather than to hurry.

What should you plan for?

Plan for the exit to occupy real attention across several weeks rather than to happen in the background. Diligence questions arrive in bursts and deserve same-day answers. Handover needs concentrated availability in the first week and a lighter, defined commitment for a month after that, written into the agreement in hours rather than as "reasonable assistance".

Plan the preparation stage separately and generously. If your evidence is thin today, the six to twelve months of consistent trading data that lets a business be priced on a clean multiple is not a delay in the exit. It is the thing that makes the exit worth doing.

Does being prepared change the price as well as the timeline?

Yes, and this is the part worth holding on to. The same work that shortens every stage also moves where you land inside the conventional range, because a buyer pricing a business they can check completely is pricing a smaller risk. A micro-SaaS producing $40,000 of trailing annual profit sits somewhere between $80,000 and $160,000 at the conventional 2–4×, and evidence quality is one of the larger inputs into which end of that spread you reach.

Speed is a by-product of that preparation rather than a separate goal. Chase the evidence and the timeline follows.

Related: how-to-exit-a-software-business, what-buyers-check-before-making-an-offer, how-to-hand-over-a-saas-business