Sheppard

Free Resource · For Founder-Operators

The Founder's Pre-Exit Marketing Playbook.

The 18-month sequenced workplan for founder-operators preparing to sell a home services business to private equity. Built from the same diligence frameworks Sheppard runs for sponsors on the buyer side.

What's Inside

  • →The 18-month sequenced pre-exit timeline
  • →The 12-tab marketing data room buyers diligence in 2026
  • →The four buyer-side stress tests that decide the multiple
  • →Vendor consolidation framework with contract-transferability checklist
  • →Brand architecture decisions for the seller (when to keep vs. consolidate)
  • →The CIM marketing narrative — what to include, what to leave out
  • →Multiple-defense KPI dashboard for the final 9 months

Stage

Vertical(s)

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Why It Matters

The marketing function decides EBITDA in negotiation.

Sophisticated buyers in home services now run a structured marketing diligence as part of any platform-scale deal. Channel concentration, attribution methodology, brand equity, vendor transferability — each gap costs 0.25-0.5 turns of EBITDA at the negotiating table.

Founders who learn what their buyer found three weeks into exclusivity surrender those turns. Founders who run the diligence on themselves twelve months earlier defend the multiple.

This playbook is the work — sequenced, dated, and scoped to fit between your operating quarters.

Frequently Asked

About the playbook.

Who is the Founder's Pre-Exit Marketing Playbook for?

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Founder-led home services operators in HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, pest control, pool, garage door, flooring, restoration, and landscaping who are planning to sell to private equity in the next 1-3 years. Useful at any platform scale, but especially designed for $10M-$75M EBITDA businesses where the marketing function will be diligenced as a discrete workstream.

What's inside the playbook?

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The 18-month sequenced timeline, the 12-tab marketing data room buyers diligence in 2026, the four buyer-side stress tests (channel concentration, attribution drift, brand equity, vendor transferability), the vendor consolidation framework, the brand-architecture decisions, and the multiple-defense KPIs that travel into the CIM.

How is this different from generic exit-prep content?

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It's home-services-specific and marketing-specific. Most exit-prep content covers financial preparation, operational cleanup, and management-team build-out. This focuses on the marketing function — the workstream that has matured into a real diligence area in 2026 and where most founders surrender EBITDA in negotiation they didn't know they had at risk.

Is the playbook free?

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Yes. We publish it to give founder-operators a clear view of what buyers will diligence and how to prepare. If you want help running the workplan inside your business, that's the engagement conversation — start with the contact form.

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