The spread is going to be brutal

I've bought and sold 7 agencies, I'll sell more.

I can tell you flat out that selling one for a fair multiple in 2026 is going to be significantly harder than it was two years ago.

There are no shortcuts to this, there never were. But the market has changed in specific ways, and if an exit is anywhere on your horizon - even five years out - you need to know about them.

The first one is churn.

Two or three years ago, 8% monthly churn was a yellow flag in a deal. Now it's a walk-away.

Buyers run the math - 8% monthly means your entire client book turns over in 12 months - and they don't want to underwrite that. If retention fundamentals aren't solid, they're not touching the deal. Full stop.

The second is founder-led sales.

Unless you're part of a rollup where you're staying on, buyers don't want founder-dependent sales engines anymore. The reasoning's obvious - if the thing they're buying stops working the second you walk away, what exactly did they just pay for? If you're still the rainmaker, the deal gets structured punitively, or it doesn't happen at all.

Related to that but distinct: owners in smaller markets are flaking post-sale. Sellers are bailing on their 2-year retention contracts after the initial payout, even when they're contractually locked in. Buyers have caught on and they've adjusted - less upfront cash, longer earn-outs. Which means unless your fundamentals are bulletproof, you're getting paid out over time. You'll spend years chasing earn-out milestones while someone else runs the business, and if those milestones slip, you're the one who eats it.

Then there's the macro piece. It's just harder to sell today than it was a year ago. Every agency owner is looking at what AI might do to their business and deciding they'd rather exit now.

Buyers see the exact same thing.

So unless you have a strategic angle or rock-solid fundamentals, they're passing or low-balling - because they know you're motivated by fear, and fear is leverage against you.

The one that surprises me the most is the fact that sellers forget their agency is a product.

Agency owners obsess over product-market fit, pricing, and client experience for their services. Then they try to sell the agency and forget the agency itself is a product too. It has a buyer, a price, a value proposition, and competitors sitting on the shelf right next to it. Same rules apply. Most sellers never do the work to position the agency as a product to the buyer - and the valuation reflects it.

And the last one is post-sale story.

Strategic buyers aren't acquiring you to keep the business flat. They need to understand how it grows without you. If you can't articulate why the business performs post-sale - who runs it, how new clients come in, what the next chapter looks like - you're getting a distress multiple. Not a fair one.

So if you want to exit for a fair EBITDA multiple in 2026 to 2028, the list is short.

• Get churn below 3%

• Remove yourself from sales and delivery

• Build systems that make the buyer confident the business runs without you

• Create the story of what this business does for them after they write the check

That's the whole list.

The spread between prepared founders and unprepared ones over the next three years is going to be brutal. I'm not being dramatic - I've been on enough sides of enough of these deals to see it coming clearly.

Which is honestly a big part of why I'm running Thursday's workshop. Three of the four items on the "prepared founder" list - getting churn down, freeing yourself from day-to-day delivery, and building systems so the agency runs on data instead of your gut - are exactly what we're covering on the 7th.

Whether your exit is in 18 months or five years, the preparation starts with the same moves.

Thursday May 14th, 2:30pm ET. 30 seats. $197.

Workshop + 1-on-1 diagnostic + profit audit + recording + live Q&A.

https://www.agencyacquisitions.io/90min-workshop-may-7-2026/

Nick