Why most founders are waiting
When I ask founders why they haven’t started a process yet, the honest answer is usually the same: they’re just not ready. Not financially — the business is doing fine. They’re not ready emotionally. Selling means letting go of something they built, and that takes time to sit with.
That’s completely understandable. But here’s what most founders don’t realize: waiting until you feel ready is the wrong strategy, because a good process needs to start before you get there.
The preparation takes real time — getting your financials clean, understanding your true normalized EBITDA, building a data room, and developing a Confidential Information Memorandum (CIM). The CIM is how we tell your story to buyers: your history, your team, your customer base, your growth, and what makes this business worth competing for. That document doesn’t write itself, and the story it tells has a direct impact on valuation. If you wait until you’re emotionally ready to sell, you’ve already lost a year of preparation.
What’s true about the market right now
There’s a version of this conversation that sounds like a pitch, so I’ll just give you the facts: there have never been more buyers chasing fewer sellers in the trades than right now.
Private equity has been building HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and landscaping platforms for years. Those platforms need to keep acquiring. Family offices are moving into the space. Strategics are competing for the same businesses. The result is a buyer-to-seller ratio that genuinely favors founders — and that creates real pricing power for owners who run a proper process.
That doesn’t mean now is always the right time for every founder. But it does mean the market argument for waiting is weaker than most people think.
The three questions that actually matter
Rather than trying to time the market, here are the questions worth sitting with:
1. Are you mentally ready to have the conversation?
2. Do you know what the business is worth today?
3. After closing — do you want to stay and help scale, or walk away and start the next chapter?
If you can’t answer all three clearly, that’s not a reason to wait — it’s a reason to start the conversation now. The answers don’t have to be perfect. They just have to exist.
What ‘waiting’ actually costs you
Most owners think of waiting as neutral — a decision to do nothing. It isn’t. Every year you wait is a year of personal financial concentration in a single illiquid asset. It’s a year of market conditions that could shift. It’s a year of buyer appetite that doesn’t move in your favor just because you want it to.
And if something changes in the business — a key employee leaves, margins compress, a competitor enters your market — the valuation conversation gets harder, not easier.
What to do if you’re on the fence
The best thing a founder can do is understand what their business is worth today and what a process would look like — before deciding anything. That conversation is free, and it changes how you think about the question entirely.
Most owners who have it stop asking ‘should I sell now or wait?’ and start asking ‘what do I actually want the next chapter to look like?’ That’s the right question.
If you’re sitting with this question and want to think it through — no process, no commitment — I’m happy to have that conversation.
Josh Gladtke is Managing Director and Partner at Good Hope Advisors. He advises founders in HVAC, plumbing, landscaping, electrical, and roofing through the sale of their businesses.