Most agency owners spend very little time thinking about how their story ends.
Not because they don’t care. But because the ending feels abstract, far away, and maybe a little uncomfortable. There are clients to serve, employees to manage, and payroll to make. Who has time to think about the exit?
Here’s the problem: if you never think about how you want the story to end, you’ll struggle to write the chapters that get you there.
So try this exercise. It’s a little unusual, but it will help.
Think of it as a practical agency exit planning exercise that helps you clarify your succession, sale, or transition goals before they become urgent.
The agency exit planning exercise
Write the press release announcing your last day as the owner of your agency.
Not a vague outline. A real draft, the kind you’d actually send. Date it, give it a headline, write the quotes. Imagine it going out to your clients, your team, your peers, and your community. Picture the version of you who reads it back and thinks, Yes. That’s exactly right.
Don’t worry about making it realistic given where you are today. Write the version that reflects where you want to end up.
Here’s what that release should include.
The headline: How are you departing? Retiring after 30 years? Selling to a strategic buyer? Handing the reins to a longtime employee? Merging with a peer agency? Passing it to a family member? The headline forces you to pick an ending, and that’s the point.
The transition: Who or what comes next – for the agency and for you? Is the agency continuing under new ownership? Is it being absorbed into another firm? Is it winding down gracefully after a long run? Are you going to become an employee rather than an owner? The answer matters, because it tells you something about the kind of decisions you need to make between now and then.
The accomplishments: What are you proudest of? This isn’t a revenue recap. It’s the stuff that actually matters. The clients you helped, the careers you built, the problems you solved, the way you ran the place.
The quote from you: What do you want to say on the way out? Not the boilerplate “it’s been an honor” language. What do you actually want to be able to say? What do you want to have been true about the way you built this thing?
The quote from someone else: Who speaks on your behalf: a longtime client, a team member, a peer? What do you want them to say about what you built and how you built it?
What’s next for you: Where are you going? Working for your earn-out? Travel? A new project? Full retirement? Consulting? This section is harder than it sounds, because a lot of agency owners have never seriously asked themselves the question.
Why this works
Most exit planning exercises focus on financial mechanics like multiples, earnouts, deal structures, and tax implications. Those things matter, but they come later. Before you can plan the how, you need to know the what.
This exercise is about what you want your exit to look like.
When you write the release, you discover things about yourself. You find out whether you care about the agency name surviving or not. You find out whether selling to a stranger bothers you, or whether it’s perfectly fine as long as your team is taken care of. You find out whether “retirement” sounds like relief or like dread. You find out whether you’re building something with a natural endpoint, or something you’d be happy to hand off to the next generation.
You also find out whether the business you’re running today is capable of producing the ending you want. If you write a release announcing a third-party acquisition but your business is built entirely around your personal relationships with clients, there’s a gap. If you write a release where a key employee takes over but you haven’t invested in developing that person (or haven’t confirmed their interest), there’s a gap. The exercise surfaces those gaps early, when you still have time to close them.
What a successful agency exit actually requires
Here’s something that gets lost in exit discussions: a healthy agency is a healthy agency, regardless of how you eventually leave it.
The characteristics that make an agency a good place to own — good clients, solid financials, strong team, documented processes, predictable revenue — are the same characteristics that make an agency attractive at exit, whether that exit is a third-party sale, an employee buyout, a family transfer, or a graceful wind-down. You don’t have to choose between building something that works for you today and building something that gives you options tomorrow. Those are the same thing.
That’s the Build to Own philosophy in a sentence. Extract value along the way through compensation, distributions, meaningful work, and a life you actually want to live – all while building something that gives you exit options when the time comes.
The press release exercise is useful precisely because it forces you to connect those two things. When you write it, you’re not just imagining a destination. You’re clarifying what kind of business you need to build to get there, whether that means succession planning, selling your agency, or winding it down on your terms.
A few things the exercise tends to reveal
When agency owners do this exercise honestly, a few patterns tend to emerge.
The accomplishments section often surprises them. The things they’re proudest of rarely have anything to do with revenue. They talk about employees who grew into leaders, clients who came back year after year, work that actually moved the needle, a culture that people genuinely wanted to be part of. Those things don’t show up on a P&L, but they matter, and they should inform how you’re running the agency right now, not just how you want to describe it at the end.
The “what’s next” section often exposes a blind spot. A lot of agency owners have no idea what they want to do after the agency. Work has been their identity for so long that imagining life without it is genuinely uncomfortable. That’s worth knowing. It affects your timeline, your financial planning, and whether a clean exit is even what you want.
The transition section often clarifies priorities. When you have to name who comes after you, you start asking whether that person exists. Whether you’ve developed them. Whether your agency could actually survive your departure — and if not, what that means for your exit options and your value to a buyer.
How to use this in your agency exit planning
Write the release, then sit with it.
What does the ending you wrote require? What kind of agency do you need to build between now and then? Does the agency you need to build for that ending match the agency you want to own in the meantime? What decisions are you making today that move you toward that ending — or away from it?
If you want to sell to a third party someday, you need to start building the team, the systems, and the client diversity that would make that possible. If you want to hand it to an employee, you need to start identifying and developing that person now (and making sure they actually want to be an owner which is often not as sure a thing as you think). If you want to wind it down on your own terms, you need to be building financial independence outside the business so you’re not trapped when the moment comes.
The press release doesn’t have to be perfect, and it doesn’t have to be permanent. Rewrite it every year or two. Make it part of your routine business planning process. Your vision for your ending will evolve, and that’s fine. The point isn’t to lock in a destination. The point is to have one.
Owners who know where they want to end up make better decisions. It’s that simple.
What next?
Take a couple of hours in the next week to draft your press release. Don’t overthink the format. Just write it as if it’s real. The drafting is where the thinking happens.
After you write it, identify one gap between the agency you have today and the agency that press release describes. Focus there first.
Share the release with a trusted peer, advisor, or partner and ask them if it rings true — both as an aspiration and as a reflection of what you’re actually building.
