Business exit strategy: bedroom startup to $100m exit

Andrew Hulbert started Pareto from his bedroom in his pants with a laptop. No funding. No backers. A council estate kid from Oxford who scraped into university and left a graduate scheme at 27 to bet on himself. Ten years later he’d built a £50m turnover business with 500 staff, completed two private equity exits, and walked away at 37 with a $100m valuation. His business exit strategy wasn’t dreamt up in a boardroom. It was forged through guerrilla marketing, brutal hours, and the painful decision to fire himself from his own company.

I sat down with Andrew on the Scale to Win podcast (episode 356) to understand exactly how he did it. What follows isn’t a sanitised case study. It’s the unvarnished version, for founder CEOs who want to build something worth buying.

What are the main business exit strategy options?

Ask a room of scale-up founders what their exit strategy is and you’ll get vague answers about ‘maybe selling one day’ and the occasional IPO fantasy. Before you can plan your exit, you need to know what you’re actually choosing. Six routes. Each demands a different set of decisions.

• Trade sale. You sell to a larger company in your sector that wants your customers, team, or technology. This is the most common route for UK scale-ups and typically achieves the highest multiples if the buyer is a strategic acquirer.
• Private equity. A PE firm buys a controlling stake, usually with the expectation that you’ll run the business for another three to five years through a second exit. Andrew completed two PE deals. This is a partial exit. You keep skin in the game.
• Management buyout. Your leadership team buys the business, often funded by external debt. This is more common where the founder wants to exit cleanly and the team has the capability and appetite. Sweet equity structures make this work.
• IPO. You take the business public. Rare for UK scale-ups below £100m turnover. High regulatory cost and management distraction.
• Employee ownership trust. You sell to an EOT, where employees collectively own the business. Tax-advantaged in the UK. More common in professional services.
• Wind down or close. The exit nobody plans but many end up doing. Not a failure if it’s managed well, but planning matters here too.

Andrew’s route was the PE path, twice over. The first deal brought in a financial backer who helped him scale. The second, larger deal delivered the $100m valuation. If you’re running a business in the £3m to £50m range, you’re almost certainly building for a trade sale or PE deal. That focus shapes every decision you make along the way.

How early should you start planning your business exit?

A Capital on Tap survey (May 2025) found that 79% of small business owners had no formal exit plan in place. If you’re running a £3m to £50m business and you’re in that 79%, the clock is ticking. The businesses that fetch the best prices are the ones where the exit strategy was baked into the operating model years before the deal.

Three to five years is the standard advice. In practice, the best exits are built from day one. Andrew’s guerrilla marketing wasn’t just about winning contracts. It was building the brand recognition that made Pareto attractive to acquirers. His sweet equity scheme wasn’t just a retention tool. It was the mechanism that made the business acquirable. Every decision he made in the early years had an exit logic behind it, even if he didn’t always frame it that way explicitly.

According to ICAEW guidance on business valuation, UK service businesses typically sell for three to eight times EBITDA, with higher multiples for businesses with recurring revenue, strong management teams, and defensible market positions. If your EBITDA is currently £1m and you want to sell for £5m, the work needed to get there takes years, not months. The multiple is earned through decisions made long before the transaction itself.

Three to five years sounds like a long time. It isn’t. It takes at least a year to make yourself genuinely redundant as CEO. Another year to get clean accounts that a buyer’s due diligence team won’t pick apart. Another year to bed in the management team so they can run without you. If you’re reading this and you haven’t started, every month you wait is a month your business is worth less than it could be at exit. Not because the market is moving. Because you are not.

Why did Andrew grind 100-hour weeks instead of chasing “balance”?

Andrew’s view on work-life balance is blunt: “Balance is bollocks.” During Pareto’s growth phase he worked 100-hour weeks consistently. His philosophy is simple. Grind in your 20s and 30s to buy back your time while you’re still young enough to enjoy it. He retired at 37. Many founders who preach balance at 30 are still grinding at 55.

But there’s a critical caveat. Andrew is emphatic that the sacrifice only makes sense if you’re building something you own. “If you’re going to make fucking sacrifices, make it for yourself, not for someone else.” He watched colleagues in graduate schemes putting in the same brutal hours to make someone else rich. That realisation pushed him out the door at 27.

What struck me in our conversation was how unsentimental Andrew is about those years. He doesn’t romanticise the grind. He treats it as a transaction: years of pain exchanged for decades of freedom. That’s a calculation many scale-up founders never make explicit.

The real question isn’t whether you’re willing to work hard. It’s whether you’re working hard on something that compounds in your favour. Andrew’s exit planning started, in effect, on day one. Every hour he put in was building equity he would eventually sell.

If you’re already ten years in and every hour you work is making the business more dependent on you, not less, you’ve got the equation backwards.

How do you compete when you can’t outspend billion-pound competitors?

Pareto operated in property services and facilities management. An industry dominated by companies with billion-pound turnovers. Andrew’s marketing budget ran close to zero. So he got creative. Three guerrilla tactics built Pareto’s brand to the point where an external survey ranked them the 6th most recognised brand in the entire sector. For a company a fraction of the size of its competitors, that’s absurd. In the best possible way.

Sponsor something nobody else will

Andrew spent £300 sponsoring an under-11s girls football team in Abingdon. Branded kits. Photos on social media. That £300 bought him something money can’t usually buy: genuine social value credentials. When pitching for contracts, Pareto could point to tangible community impact. The billion-pound competitors with their corporate CSR decks couldn’t match it. It felt real because it was real.

Write everything, everywhere

Pareto published 150 free articles across five major trade magazines. Not paid advertorials. Genuine thought leadership pieces that positioned Andrew and his team as experts. This is how you build brand recognition without a marketing department (and without spending a penny on advertising). Pareto’s name appeared alongside the industry giants constantly. Repetition built credibility.

The £25k donut strategy

This one still makes me laugh. Andrew spent £25,000 on branded donuts. Not just any donuts. Vegan options. Gluten-free options. Every pitch meeting, every building walk-around, out came the Pareto donuts. It sounds trivial. It wasn’t. Those donuts disarmed the corporate stiffness of formal procurement processes. People remembered Pareto. They talked about the donuts. The cost was a fraction of traditional B2B marketing, and the return on investment was extraordinary.

I know the power of this because I’ve done the same thing, four times over. At Rackspace, Sam’s mum made the cakes. At IT Lab, Richard’s mum made them. At Peer 1, I found a woman in Lymington who’d bake them for me. At Monkhouse and Company, we’re still doing it. Every client coaching day starts with a cake that has their company name iced on top. It costs almost nothing. It signals something money can’t buy: we made this for you, specifically, today.

What connects all three tactics is the same principle: when you can’t compete on budget, compete on memorability. Big companies are structurally incapable of doing things that feel human. They have compliance departments, brand guidelines, and approval chains. A founder CEO with a credit card and a good instinct can move faster and feel more authentic.

What made 5,000 jellybeans the best sales pitch in facilities management?

When you’re pitching against a conglomerate, the procurement team is taking a career risk by choosing you. Andrew understood this. So he made the risk visible in reverse. One competitor’s carbon footprint: 1 million tons. Pareto’s: 169 tons. He put 5,000 jellybeans on the table to represent the competitor’s emissions. Then a third of a single jellybean for Pareto’s.

The visual was devastating. No slide deck could communicate the difference that clearly. But Andrew went further. He openly acknowledged that choosing Pareto was a risk for the buyer. That honesty built trust. Rather than pretending to be a giant, he leaned into being small, nimble, and transparent.

This works long before the exit. If you want to build a business worth acquiring, you need contracts that prove your model works at scale. Pretending to be a giant doesn’t get you there. Reframing your smallness as an advantage does.

How did sweet equity stop Pareto losing a single senior leader in 10 years?

Andrew carved out 20% equity and distributed it among 15 senior leaders. The result: he didn’t lose a single one of them in a decade. In an industry with notoriously high staff turnover, that’s almost unheard of. And it wasn’t just good for retention. It was the mechanism that made the exit possible.

Think about what a buyer is actually purchasing when they acquire a services business. They’re buying the team. If your senior leadership team walks out six months after the deal, the acquirer has overpaid. Andrew’s sweet equity scheme meant his leaders were financially aligned with the exit. They wanted the deal to happen. They stayed to make it happen.

Twenty percent sounds generous. But consider the alternative. Replacing 15 senior leaders over 10 years would have cost Pareto millions in recruitment, onboarding, lost client relationships, and institutional knowledge. The sweet equity was cheaper than the churn it prevented. And it made the business dramatically more attractive to buyers.

Call it the equity hoarding trap. Many founders fall into it. They hold on because sharing feels like giving away what they’ve built. Andrew saw it differently. Sharing 20% created a team so committed that the remaining 80% was worth far more at exit than 100% of a leaky ship.

Or, if you want the shadow version: founders who hoard equity end up selling businesses where the senior team has one foot out the door. Buyers see that. They price it in. The founder who refused to share 20% discovers at the negotiating table that their 100% is worth less than Andrew’s 80%.

Why did Andrew fire himself from his own company?

This is where the story gets uncomfortable for many founder CEOs. Andrew realised that corporate buyers hated his persona. He’s energetic, chaotic, and direct. The kind of person who builds a £50m business from nothing. But also the kind of person who makes a risk-averse procurement panel nervous.

So he removed himself from pitches. In his place he sent a former RAF Air Traffic Controller with 30 years of experience. The man wore a suit and exuded calm authority. They won the contract.

Later, Andrew went further. He hired an external CEO to take the business through the final exit. “When you’ve run something yourself for nine years, you need to go and hire a CEO that not only is going to be good enough to take the business on, but also get them through the next exit.”

This is the hardest lesson in how to scale a business beyond the founder. The qualities that got you from zero to £10m are often the qualities that repel buyers at £50m. Scrappiness reads as chaos. Founder energy reads as key-person risk. The business exit strategy that actually works requires you to make yourself redundant. Not because you’ve failed, but because you’ve succeeded.

You’ve probably told yourself you’ll figure this out when the time comes. That’s comfortable. It’s also expensive. Many scale-up founders talk about “stepping back” in vague terms. Andrew did it concretely. He identified exactly which situations his personality was a liability, removed himself from those situations, and replaced himself with people who were better suited to the next phase. That’s not ego death. That’s commercial intelligence.

What happens to your identity after a $100m exit?

Andrew worked with business psychologist Stuart Duff for eight weeks before selling Pareto. Duff compared selling a business to winning Olympic gold. You train for a decade, you win, and then you face an identity crisis. Who are you when the thing that defined you is gone?

Andrew’s post-exit behaviour proves the point. He bought a bright yellow McLaren for £100,000. On impulse. Debit card. No test drive. There was a problem: at 6’3” and 18 stone, he couldn’t fit in it properly. Worse, it made him feel like a fraud. “Just reminded me of the Inbetweeners, like ‘bus wanker’ every time I was going past.” He sold it at a £10,000 loss. Replaced it with a 1959 Series 2 Land Rover.

I know exactly what he means. I’ve got a Series 3 myself. No McLaren. No desire for one. Just a green Land Rover with two chocolate labs in the back. Andrew would approve.

The McLaren story is funny. But underneath it sits something serious. “Money does not buy happiness, and even bright yellow McLarens definitely don’t buy happiness.”

What did make Andrew happy was the day he withdrew £250,000 in cash from Barclays, stuffed it into a Sainsbury’s bag, rode his quad bike home, and dumped it on his dad’s floor to retire him. He bought houses for his parents and his sister. The council estate kid who started in his pants with a laptop could look after the people who’d raised him.

I’ve spoken to dozens of founders post-exit. The pattern is always the same. The flash purchase that feels hollow. The identity wobble. Then the gradual realisation that the money only matters when it’s used for the people you care about. Andrew got there faster than most because he did the psychological work beforehand. Eight weeks with a business psychologist isn’t an indulgence. It’s due diligence on yourself.

What should a founder CEO do with this exit strategy?

Andrew’s story isn’t a fairy tale. It’s a sequence of uncomfortable decisions that the average scale-up founder avoids until it’s too late.

He decided early that he was building to sell. That single decision changed everything: the marketing, the equity structure, the hire of an external CEO. Every move had exit logic behind it. Not because he was cynical about Pareto, but because he was honest about what he wanted from it.

Here’s the question you’re probably dodging: have you made that decision yet? Because if you haven’t, you’re not building an asset. You’re building a job. You’re accumulating years of effort that will be worth whatever a buyer decides on the day, not what you planned for.

Andrew spent a decade making himself redundant. He gave away 20% of his equity. He hired someone better suited to the boardroom. He bought the donuts and sponsored the girls’ football team while his competitors were running procurement theatre. None of it looked like a conventional exit strategy. All of it was.

So what are you building? And who’s it actually for?

Business exit strategy FAQ

What is a business exit strategy?

A business exit strategy is the plan a founder-CEO puts in place to sell or transfer their company. It covers the route (trade sale, PE deal, management buyout, or another mechanism) and the conditions that need to be true for the deal to work. The critical thing most founders miss: a good exit strategy is not a document you write before selling. It is baked into how you run the business for years beforehand. Every decision about equity, leadership, brand, and your own replaceability either raises or lowers the price you get on the day. Andrew Hulbert’s $100m Pareto exit wasn’t built in a boardroom. It was built through years of operating decisions (sweet equity, external CEO, guerrilla brand-building) that made the business worth buying without him in it.

What are the most common business exit strategies for UK founders?

Trade sales and private equity deals dominate UK scale-up exits. Trade sales typically deliver the highest multiples because the buyer wants your customers, your team, or your market position. Private equity suits founders who want a partial exit with skin still in the game, as Andrew Hulbert did at Pareto. Management buyouts work when the leadership team has the appetite and the backing to own what they’ve been running. IPOs and employee ownership trusts are less common below £100m turnover. According to the British Business Bank’s Small Business Equity Tracker (2024), PE-backed exits in the UK reached their highest volume in five years, reflecting renewed buyer appetite in the mid-market.

How do you increase the value of a business before exit?

The biggest drivers of value at exit are recurring revenue, a management team that runs without the founder, clean auditable accounts, a defensible market position, and low customer concentration. Andrew addressed all five: sweet equity locked in his senior leaders, guerrilla marketing built brand recognition that reduced buyer risk, and hiring an external CEO eliminated key-person dependency. According to ICAEW guidance on business valuation, UK service businesses typically sell for three to eight times EBITDA, with the higher end reserved for businesses with exactly these characteristics. The gap between a 4x and a 7x multiple is built over years, not weeks. If exit planning is something you plan to “get around to”, the discount is already priced into your business.

How early should you plan your business exit?

Three to five years before the intended exit date is the baseline. The founders who get the best outcomes start earlier, often embedding exit logic into operating decisions from year one. It takes at least a year to build a leadership team that can run the business without you. Another year to get accounts clean enough to survive due diligence. Another year to demonstrate consistent performance under that new structure. Andrew effectively started from day one. The sweet equity, the brand-building, the external CEO hire. All exit-enabling decisions disguised as operating ones. If you’re running a £3m to £50m business and haven’t started this work, every month of delay is quietly reducing what a buyer will pay.

What is sweet equity and how does it help with a business exit?

Sweet equity is a mechanism where a founder grants equity to senior leaders, typically at a low or nominal valuation, so they share in the upside of the eventual sale. Andrew Hulbert gave 20% to 15 leaders across Pareto. The result was zero senior leader churn in a decade, which is extraordinary in an industry with notoriously high turnover. For acquirers, team continuity is a critical part of what they’re buying. A services business where the senior team walks out six months after the deal is worth significantly less than one where the leadership is financially aligned with the transaction. Sweet equity solves retention and alignment in one move. The business becomes more valuable at exit and more attractive during due diligence. That’s not generosity. That’s arithmetic.

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Your move. Andrew started making himself redundant at 27. He gave away equity when it hurt. He hired his own replacement. That’s why he retired at 37. The founders who left those decisions until they “felt ready” are still working. Which version are you building towards?