The seller's second act: 90 days after you sign

Most advice for sellers stops at the same moment: the wire lands, the deal is done, congratulations. But the sale is not really finished when the money arrives. Your job – and, more to the point, your reputation – carries on for the next 90 days. How you handle that window decides whether the buyer succeeds, whether your name is worth referring, and whether your own next move starts from a clean slate or a lingering mess.

On a curated platform like Indiemaker, sales settle in full by cash or wire at close, through escrow.com. There is no earn-out to chase, no deferred payment tied to future performance, no financial reason to stay entangled. That is exactly why the post-sale window is about something better than money: goodwill and a clean handover. This is the seller's counterpart to the buyer's opening stretch – if you want to see what the other side of the table is working through, our guide to the first 30 days after you've bought it is the mirror image of this one.

What you still owe after the money lands

The wire clearing does not dissolve your obligations, it activates a different set of them. In most small deals you have agreed to some period of support and handover, and the buyer has paid, in part, for a smooth transition. That is the debt you are now settling.

Get specific about what that actually includes before day one. Usually it is some combination of answering questions, transferring knowledge, completing access handovers, and being reachable while the buyer finds their feet. What it is not is running the business for someone else at no charge for an open-ended stretch. The difference between those two things is the difference between a clean 90 days and a resentful one, and it comes down to defining the terms in writing.

Days 1–14: running the support window without becoming the ops team

Define the support window on paper before it starts: scope, hours, channels, and – above all – a firm end date. "I'll be around to help" is a trap. "Email support, up to a few hours a week, for 60 days, ending on this date" is a boundary both sides can plan around.

The first fortnight is when the buyer's questions come thickest, and it is tempting to just do things for them because it is faster. Resist it. Every task you complete for the buyer is knowledge that leaves with you; every task you talk them through is knowledge that stays. Answer through the agreed channel, keep to the agreed hours, and steer questions toward teaching rather than doing. You are a guide in these two weeks, not the operations team.

Days 15–45: transferring knowledge, then stepping back

The goal of the middle stretch is to make yourself progressively less necessary. If the buyer needs you more in week four than in week two, something has gone wrong.

Front-load the knowledge transfer. Get the important, hard-won context out of your head early – the quirks, the seasonal patterns, the "we tried that and it didn't work" lessons, the supplier who is reliable and the one who is not. Written handover notes do more work than any number of calls, because they keep serving the buyer after your window closes. A useful test: each week, the questions should get fewer and more advanced. When the buyer is asking about strategy rather than where things are, you have transferred what mattered, and you can begin stepping back on schedule rather than drifting on indefinitely.

Closing out lingering obligations and access

A clean exit means no loose threads left dangling in your name. This is the unglamorous part that separates a professional handover from a sloppy one, so hunt every tie down deliberately.

Look for shared logins that still carry your credentials. Personal API keys the business depends on. Recurring subscriptions and tools still billed to your card. Any guarantee, contract, or account registered in your name that now belongs to the buyer's world. Domain and registrar access, payment accounts, email forwarding, third-party integrations authenticated through your personal profile – all of it needs to move or be closed. The asset inventory you built for the sale is the right tool here; if you did not build one, our guide to the asset inventory that turns a scary handover into a boring one shows exactly what to catalogue. Anything still fused to you personally is a future phone call you do not want to get. For why some assets resist transfer in the first place, see what makes a digital project transferable.

What to do with the proceeds (without rushing)

The money has landed. The strong instinct is to do something with it immediately – redeploy it into the next idea, make a big purchase, put it to work. The better instinct is to slow down.

Park the proceeds somewhere safe and boring first. Then deal with the obligations attached to them: set aside what you will owe in tax, because a sale can carry a liability that is easy to underestimate in the excitement, and getting proper advice on your own situation is worth the cost. Only once the money is parked and the tax is accounted for should you think about what comes next. Very few good decisions get made in the first week after a windfall. There is no prize for redeploying fast, and a real cost to redeploying badly.

What to do with the freed time and identity shift

There is a part of selling that catches people off guard: the gap where the business used to be. For months or years it filled your attention, your identity, maybe your sense of momentum. Then it is gone, and the freed-up time can feel less like a holiday and more like a vacuum.

Plan for that gap deliberately rather than letting it pull you back toward the business you just sold. The most common failure of the seller's second act is drifting back in – over-servicing the buyer, hovering, offering unsolicited help – not because the buyer needs it but because you miss it. Decide in advance what the freed time is for, even loosely: rest, a next project, time you owed to something outside work. If your instinct is to spin up something new, our note on how to raise revenue in a newly acquired business is written for the buyer, but the growth thinking translates cleanly to whatever you build next.

Protecting your reputation for the next deal

Here is the quiet compounding truth of the small end of the market: it is a small world, and sellers get talked about. A seller who exits cleanly – responsive in the support window, thorough in the handover, gracious when the buyer stumbles – earns referrals and an easier next sale. A seller who goes quiet the moment the wire clears, or leaves a trail of tangled access and half-answered questions, carries that story into every future conversation.

You are not just closing this deal. You are building the track record that prices your next one. Treat the 90 days as reputation work, because that is what they are.

The clean-break checklist

End the second act the way you started it: on paper. Do not let the support window simply fade out with nobody quite sure whether it is over. Close it deliberately.

Confirm the support period has reached its agreed end date. Confirm knowledge transfer is complete and documented. Confirm every login, key, subscription, and account has moved or been closed, with nothing still billed to or registered against you. Confirm the buyer agrees the obligations are met. Then get a short, mutual sign-off – a simple written acknowledgement from both sides that the handover is complete and the obligations are discharged.

That sign-off is the real end of the sale. It protects the buyer, who now owns a business with no strings back to you. It protects you, who can walk away knowing there is no unfinished business waiting to resurface. And it closes your second act cleanly, which is the whole point. The wire was the easy part. A clean 90 days is what makes you a seller people want to deal with again.