The six months before a deal closes are the most important six months in an owner’s business life.

They’re also the six months when most owners get fully absorbed in a job they didn’t ask for, and probably never done before. It’s a lot of work. It’s emotional. The ups and downs are constant throughout the process.

Everyone knows a deal can die on the numbers. Bad financials. A buyer pulling a last-minute switcheroo. These are the deal-killers people talk about.

I’ve been in banking twenty-five years. More often, what kills these deals is fatigue. Time kills deals.

Here’s what actually happens when you run a real process, and what falls apart when you don’t.

What a real process looks like from the inside.

Most founders imagine the sale process as: find a buyer, negotiate the number, sign the papers. That is the visible part. Here is what is actually happening at the same time.

There is a confidential information memorandum to write, a management presentation to prepare, a data room to build. There are NDAs to track, buyer qualification calls to run, and follow-up questions to answer, sometimes dozens of them, in parallel, from buyers who all want the information at the same time. There is a letter of intent to negotiate, which is just the beginning of a second and more granular negotiation that runs through due diligence. There are lawyers and accountants coordinating on both sides. There are customer and employee communication plans to keep ready in case something leaks.

And through all of it, there is your business. Which still needs to run. Customers still call. Equipment still breaks. Employees still need leadership. The quarter still needs to close.

The business does not pause because the sale is happening. If anything, buyers are watching it more closely during this period than they ever will again. They know you are distracted. Some of them count on it.

What I actually do.

People often think M&A is about finding the buyer, as if the outcome comes down to who can reach them. In reality, buyers want to be found. They run paid search. They hire teams to do this. They show up at conferences, send unsolicited LOIs, and bombard your inbox. Finding them is not the hard part.

The real work is running the process. A deal isn’t two parties. It’s a dozen. The seller has lawyers, accountants, partners, sometimes a board. The buyer has investors, lenders, partners, an investment committee, and three other deals in their pipeline. Everyone is moving at a different speed with competing priorities. Somebody has to be the metronome.

My job is to be the pace car. To know when to push, when to wait, when to walk. To keep a dozen people across two camps moving in time, and to protect the seller’s attention for the decisions that actually matter, the ones no advisor can make for them.

That’s what I do. The rest is just finding buyers.

What success actually looks like.

Before you start a process, ask yourself what success actually looks like.

If success looks like a buyer finding you, offering a fair price, and you managing the whole thing on the side while running your business, you may have a surprise coming.

That happens. It just doesn’t happen often, and when it does, it usually leaves money on the table.

A real process is different. It’s competitive. It’s structured. It runs on a timeline. And it requires someone whose full-time job is running it. That isn’t you. You have a business to run.

Running a competitive sale process while operating a business at full speed requires two of you. Most people only have one.

If you are thinking about a sale in the next twelve to twenty-four months, the time to start that conversation is not when a buyer calls. It is before anyone knows you are thinking about it.

Twenty-five years in banking taught me something counterintuitive. Deals die on price less often than people think. They die more often on process. On fatigue. On the seller who has run out of patience, runway, and clarity right at the finish line.

That’s the part nobody warns you about.

Gregg Lerman is COO and Partner at Good Hope Advisors. Twenty-five years in banking, as owner, investor, and advisor.