Adrian Bray

86 percent of middle-market firms have AI in operations. 36 percent have it embedded where it counts.

Post 4 of 7

RSM surveyed 827 US and 203 Canadian middle-market executives about AI this July. Three of the numbers are worth putting next to each other.

Eighty-six percent have AI integrated into operations. Thirty-six percent have it fully embedded across core processes. Ninety-seven percent say they are satisfied with the business value it delivers.

Almost everyone has it. Around a third have it where it changes how the business runs. And nearly all of them are pleased.

Set that against the number everyone quotes from the other direction. MIT's 2025 study of enterprise AI found 95 percent of generative AI pilots produced no measurable return. The methodology has been publicly challenged since, and you should know that before you use it at a board meeting.

Both can be accurate, because they measure different things. Satisfaction is what an executive reports about a tool their team uses. Measurable return is what shows up on the P&L. The distance between those two is the subject of this article.

We have been here before. I saw it with ERP, with CRM, with business intelligence, and the pattern each time was the same: the tool arrived, adoption stalled, staff worked their way back to the familiar method, and three years later somebody canceled the licenses without discussion.

Where the money is coming from

The spending is not tentative. Fifty-eight percent of those executives plan to put $1 million or more into AI this fiscal year, and 84 percent expect to increase AI spending next year.

That money is being moved from somewhere, and this is the part of the survey I would pin to a wall. Among firms increasing AI investment, 43 percent are cutting business intelligence and analytics, 41 percent are cutting cybersecurity, and 40 percent are cutting external consulting and advisory.

Then the same survey asks what is stopping them scaling AI. Data quality, at 34 percent. Security and privacy, at 30 percent. Integrating legacy systems, at 28 percent.

Read those two lists together. Firms are defunding analytics and cybersecurity in order to buy AI, and then naming data quality and security as the two things preventing the AI from working. That is not a technology problem. It is the execution gap with a budget line attached.

I will note the third item on the cuts list without arguing with it. Forty percent are reducing external advice, which includes people like me. What I would say is that the firms cutting their data and security capability to fund an AI program are the ones most likely to need help within eighteen months, and they will be buying it in worse circumstances than these.

The questions worth asking instead

Most of the AI conversation aimed at owners is written by people selling AI. It asks whether you are behind. That framing produces bad decisions, and it is the reason so much money is about to go into pilots that produce nothing.

Top down

The owners I talk to who are getting somewhere ask a narrower question: which two processes in this firm consume the most senior time for the least client value, can a machine do part of that acceptably, and how much human judgment is required.

There is a follow-on question of equal weight. Are those processes solid, outdated, or a workaround nobody ever went back and fixed? Automating a workaround gives you a faster workaround and a longer-term problem.

Those questions have a short list of answers in almost every professional services business.

Proposal and document production. First drafts, prior-work retrieval, formatting, tailoring boilerplate to a client. Senior people spend hours here and clients pay for none of it.

Research and first-pass analysis. Summarizing source material, finding comparable data, assembling the background section that a junior used to build over two days.

Meeting capture and follow-up. Notes, actions, the summary email, the file note that half your team writes late on Thursday and the other half never writes at all.

Internal knowledge retrieval. The question "have we done something like this before" currently answered by asking three people and hoping one of them remembers.

None of that is glamorous. All of it is senior hours going into work nobody bills, in a business where senior hours are your scarcest asset and your largest cost.

Bottom up

The mistake I see most is running this in one direction only.

Ask your team the same question. Where do they see two processes that are good candidates for automation and would give them leverage to do more advanced work? They will name things you have never seen, because you have not done that part of the job in six years. The follow-on question applies to them too: is the process solid, outdated, or a workaround, and are the steps in it still the right steps?

Then ask the question almost nobody asks until it is too late. How does this change roles, responsibilities and the structure of the organization? If a junior analyst's first two years were built around work a machine now does in an afternoon, your training model just changed, and so did the path you offer someone joining next September. Better to decide that deliberately than to discover it when your best second-year associate resigns because the job stopped being interesting.

Bottom up also decides adoption, and the RSM survey puts a number on why. Eighty-five percent of those executives said leadership enthusiasm for AI exceeds employee enthusiasm. That gap is the adoption problem stated as a statistic. People implement what they helped design. They work around what was handed to them.

The ROI question, answered honestly

Owners ask what a realistic twelve-month return looks like. Vendors quote percentages that assume everything works. What I have seen in practice starts smaller and arrives sooner: five hours a week back for one person, a couple of days a month across a team.

Here is how I would model it. Take one process from the lists above. Count the hours it consumes across the firm in a month, at loaded cost, not billing rate. Assume a tool plus a reworked process removes 30 to 40 percent of those hours in the first year, not the 80 percent in the sales deck, because your people will spend time checking output, some of it will be wrong, and they will need to modify how they work.

Then decide what happens to the hours that are now available, and what new skills the team should build so they can have a stronger impact with them. This part decides whether the investment returns anything. Hours that convert to billable delivery or business development produce a return. Hours that convert to slightly less pressure produce a happier team and no measurable change on the P&L, which may be a legitimate choice and should be made on the record.

Firms that do this arithmetic before buying tend to buy less and use more of what they buy.

Why the embedded number is the one that decides it

The gap between 86 percent using AI and 36 percent having it embedded does not mean two thirds of firms need to hire a data scientist. For a 40-person professional services business that would be a mistake.

What it means is that adoption needs an owner inside the firm, with time allocated, standards to set, and the authority to change how work gets done. It also needs a budget, for internal capacity as much as for the software. Somebody has to decide which tools are permitted, what client information may never go near them, how output gets checked before it reaches a client, and what the standard is for a document a machine helped produce.

Write the reasoning down alongside the rules. A policy that says "no client data in external tools" gets worked around within a month, the first Friday afternoon a deadline stands between somebody and getting home at a reasonable hour. The same policy, with two lines explaining which client obligations it protects and what happens to the firm if one of them is breached, gets followed by people who then apply the same logic to the situation you did not anticipate. Rules cover what you thought of. Reasoning covers the rest.

Without that person, three things happen. Your team uses these tools anyway, on personal accounts, what gets called shadow usage, with client material in it, whatever their intentions were about taking it out first, and you find out later. Quality varies by whoever is at the keyboard. And nothing changes in how delivery is structured, so you pay for tools and keep the old cost base.

On the fear underneath

A version of this question comes up privately with almost every owner, and it is rarely asked in the room with the team present.

If a machine can do a first draft, research, and analysis, what happens to a business that sells expertise by the hour.

My read, for what it is worth. The part of your service that is information retrieval and document production is going to cost less, and clients will expect to pay less for it within a few years. The part that is judgment, accountability, relationship, and being the person a client calls when something has gone wrong is not close to being automated, and it is the part your clients value most when they are under pressure.

The firms at risk are the ones whose value sits mostly in the first category and who price as though it sits in the second. If your fees are largely justified by volume of output, that is worth confronting this year on your own terms.

The firms in a strong position are the ones who use the cost reduction to do more of the judgment work, at better margin, for clients who want a person accountable. That was always the better business. This is going to make the difference between the two more visible.

Where I would start on Monday

One process for your seniors. The one where they lose the most time to work clients do not pay for. Measure the hours it takes now, at loaded cost.

One process for the team. The one they lose the most time to, or the one clients push back on when they see it itemized on the bill. Measure that the same way, and ask whether automating it would produce an advantage over the current approach or just a faster version of something that was never right.

One person named as owner, with hours protected for it, a budget, and a one-page policy on client data that carries the reasoning as well as the rules.

One number to judge it on in ninety days, decided before you spend anything.

Three months of that teaches you more about what this technology does for a firm your size than a year of reading about it. And it keeps you out of the group that spends capital on capability they have nobody to operate.

Sources

Figures in this article were taken from the sources below on 14 September 2026. Each entry gives the reference period the data covers and the date it was published, so you can judge how current a number is whenever you happen to read this.

RSM US, Middle Market AI Survey 2026. Survey of 827 US and 203 Canadian middle-market executives, published 21 July 2026. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

https://rsmus.com/insights/services/digital-transformation/rsm-middle-market-ai-survey.html

https://rsmus.com/insights/services/digital-transformation/rsm-middle-market-ai-survey/rise-ai-spend-money-going.html

MIT NANDA, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business. Published 2025. The 95 percent figure has been challenged on methodology since publication. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

by Adrian Bray

Why your team still brings you everything

Post 5 of 7

Twenty-five people. Good people, most of them with you for years. And you are still the person who decides whether a proposal goes out at that price, whether the client gets told about the delay today or Friday, whether the junior who missed a deadline twice gets a conversation or a warning.

Draw the organization chart honestly and you are in the center of something that looks like a spider's web, or like you in a cape, rescuing the universe.

You have asked yourself why they still need this much from you. You have probably asked it in a way that includes some version of: is it them, or is it me.

It is neither. It is that nobody in your business knows what you would decide, or why you would decide it that way, because both have only ever happened in your head.

What your team is missing

Your judgment is thirty years of pattern recognition applied in about four seconds. You look at a proposal and know the price is wrong. You read an email from a client and know they are unhappy before they say so. You watch a new hire in a meeting and know within a month whether they will make it.

None of that is written down, or it sits in your notebook in a form nobody else could follow. It has never needed to be, because you were available.

So your team does the rational thing. They bring you the decision, because bringing it to you is faster and safer than guessing what you would want and being wrong. Every time they do that and you decide well, you teach them to bring you the next one. The behavior you find frustrating is the behavior your business rewards.

This is not a criticism of how you have led. It is what happens when a business grows past the size where one person can be the operating standard, while still having one person as the operating standard.

The four things that are missing, specifically

The why behind the decision. This is the one I see missed most, and the one almost nobody writes about. Firms hand down the standard, the approval limit, and the occasional lesson from a mistake, and stop there. What never gets said is the reasoning: why this price and not that one, what you learned in 2014 when you took a client like the one now sitting in front of your manager, which risk you are protecting against, what you tried before that did not work. To you it is assumed. Nobody has ever spoken it out loud. So your team receives a rule with no reasoning attached, and a rule with no reasoning cannot be applied to a situation you did not anticipate. Which is most situations. Give people the why and they can decide in the cases you never wrote down. Give them the rule alone and they come back to you the moment reality varies.

A written standard for the decisions that recur. Pricing. Scope changes. When to escalate a client problem. What good work looks like before it leaves the building. Most firms this size have none of these on paper, and the ones they do have were written for a smaller business. Your team does not need your permission on these. They need to know the rule, the reasoning under it, and the limit of their authority inside it.

Authority that matches responsibility. You have people who are responsible for a team's output and cannot approve a $3,000 spend or agree a scope change without you. Responsibility without authority produces exactly one behavior, which is checking with you, and it is the correct behavior given what they have been given.

Permission to be wrong inside a limit. A manager who has never made a decision without you will make a worse decision than you would, the first several times. If the response to the first mistake is you taking the decision back, you have taught the whole group that authority is conditional on being right, and nobody will use it again.

The part owners rarely say out loud

There is a second reason this persists, and I include myself in it from my own years running a firm.

Being needed is not unpleasant. The calls, the escalations, the fact that the business stops when you are unreachable: all of it is exhausting and all of it confirms that you are central. Owners who say they want a business that runs without them are telling the truth, and a number of them also dread the day it does.

I have sat with owners who built a capable leadership group and then found the first quiet month genuinely difficult. Not because anything went wrong. Because nothing did, they felt a little lost, and they had to decide what they were for as they moved into leading the next phase of growth.

Worth naming before you start, because it is the thing that stalls the process at month eight, and it gets explained as the team not being ready.

What twelve months looks like

I have taken firms through this and the sequence is consistent.

Months one to three. Write down the recurring decisions, why they get decided that way, and who owns each, what success looks like, and any timeline or other expectations attached. Pricing, scope, hiring, spend, escalation, quality sign-off. For each one, set the limit: below this, decide and tell me afterward, which is trust and verify. Above this, bring it. The limits should be higher than feels comfortable, and the risk inside them is shared, because low limits produce the same traffic you have now with more paperwork.

Do not write all of it alone. Have the people who will use these rules draft the first version, then correct it. They know which decisions recur and which of your standards they have been guessing at for years. You will find three you did not know existed, and they will own the result in a way they never would if you handed it down finished.

Months three to nine. Hand the decisions over and let them be made imperfectly. Your job in this period is a weekly review of what was decided and why, with coaching after the fact and no reversals unless something is about to damage a client. This is the part that separates firms that change from firms that run the exercise and end up where they started. It requires you to watch money get spent slightly worse than you would spend it, for about six months.

Months nine to twelve. The pattern is visible. Some people have grown into the authority and are leading the way, and some may not have, and you now have evidence instead of an opinion. One or two roles need to change. That conversation is easier with nine months of decisions behind it.

By the end of that year the volume reaching you drops by something like two thirds, and what does reach you is the genuinely difficult material, which is the part you are good at and the part you wanted to be doing. It also frees you to look at the capabilities the business will need ahead of it, instead of the ones it needed last year.

Why this is the highest-return project in your business

A firm whose decisions route through the founder has a hard growth limit and a soft valuation. Any buyer, any successor, any bank looks at dependence first, because it tells them what they are purchasing. And they do not look only at you. A firm where one technical lead owns the client relationships, or where the whole leadership group plans to retire the year after you sell, carries the same discount under a different name.

A business that needs one person is a job with staff attached. A business that runs on standards, reasoning and capable people is an asset.

The same change produces both outcomes. You get your week back, and the business becomes worth something without you in it. There are not many projects that pay twice.

It also takes longer than people expect, which is the argument for starting before you need it. The delegation piece runs about a year. Building a second layer deep enough that a buyer or a successor would rely on it runs closer to three.

Your team is capable. They have been trained, by a system nobody designed, to check with you. That is changeable, and the change starts with writing down what you would decide and why, so somebody else can decide it.

by Adrian Bray

The 2026 cost picture, translated for a 30-person services firm

Post 3 of 7

Macro commentary is written for people who allocate capital across an index. You run one business, with one client list and one payroll. Most of what gets published this year tells you the weather without telling you whether to bring a coat.

So here are the 2026 numbers that reach a private firm of 20 to 100 people, and what each one should change on your side of the desk. Every figure below was taken from its source on 14 September 2026 and carries the period it covers. If you are reading this some months later, the reference periods tell you how much of it has aged. The dates say 2026. If your business is more than ten years old, you have been through this cycle before, and probably more than once.

The numbers, briefly

Prices. Headline inflation ran at 3.4 percent over the twelve months through August 2026. Core inflation, stripping out food and energy, was 2.4 percent.

Labor. The Employment Cost Index puts private industry compensation up 3.3 percent over the year to June 2026. Wages and salaries rose 3.2 percent and benefit costs rose 3.8 percent. For a services firm this is the number that counts, because payroll is most of your cost base, and it is running above core inflation.

Energy. Up 16.3 percent over the twelve months through August 2026, accelerating from 14.7 percent over the twelve months through July. The direction is worth more than the level here: the annual rate is rising, not settling.

Money. The prime rate is 7.50 percent. That puts an SBA 7(a) variable loan at roughly 9.75 to 12.25 percent, an SBA 504 fixed portion at 6.50 to 7.50 percent, a conventional term loan at 8 percent and upward depending on the borrower, and a business line of credit at 10 to 24 percent on the drawn balance.

Tariffs. The effective US tariff rate sat around 7 to 9 percent in early September 2026, having peaked nearer 15 to 20 percent in mid-2025 and then fallen after the Supreme Court invalidated the IEEPA tariffs in February. J.P. Morgan estimates the tariffs in place could add 1 to 1.5 percent to consumer prices, and their analysis is blunt about who pays: the incidence falls on domestic sellers and buyers, not on foreign producers. The volatility is the part to plan around. The rate has moved by ten points inside eighteen months.

What each one changes for you

Labor cost is your inflation. A services firm passes cost through in one place: price. If your salary bill went up 15 percent across three years and your rates went up 4 percent, you have already given away the difference. The correction is a repricing program across your client list, sequenced so the least price-sensitive clients move first and you learn from those conversations before you get to the sensitive ones. Owners dread this. The clients who value the relationship move without drama, and the ones who leave were the ones costing you money.

I will admit the dilemma runs both ways, because I am on both sides of it. As a business owner buying services, I want my suppliers to keep their prices where they are. As the person setting my own rates, I want mine to go up. Every client you are nervous about calling is sitting with the same contradiction, which is a better starting point for the conversation than the one most owners imagine.

Fixed-fee work needs escalation language. Any engagement running longer than twelve months on a fixed fee is a bet that your costs will stay flat. They will not. Multi-year agreements want an annual adjustment clause tied to a published index or a stated percentage. New agreements should carry it as standard. Existing ones get it at renewal. This is ordinary commercial practice and clients accept it when it is written plainly and raised early.

Financing is a decision with a deadline attached. If you have debt maturing in the next two years, or a line you will draw on to fund growth, price the terms available to you this quarter. An owner who arranged facilities in 2021 is carrying an expectation of money that no longer exists: a line of credit at 10 to 24 percent on the drawn balance prices very differently from the same facility five years ago, and a growth plan built on drawing it down needs rechecking against those numbers. Lengthen maturities where you can. Be selective about growth bets that depend on cheap leverage, because that assumption is doing a lot of work in most plans I read.

Tariffs reach you sideways. Your firm may import nothing. Your clients might, your software vendors price in a market affected by it, and the equipment you replace costs more. The exposure worth mapping is client concentration in tariff-affected sectors. If 30 percent of your revenue sits with manufacturers or distributors absorbing import cost increases, their budget pressure becomes your renewal conversation next year. Know that before they tell you. And note what the volatility does to their planning: a rate that moved from 20 percent to 7 percent inside a year makes it very hard for your client to commit to anything twelve months out, which shows up as shorter engagements and later decisions on your side.

The tax change is worth an afternoon with your accountant. Capital spending timing, depreciation, entity structure. Most owners at this size leave money on the table by treating tax as a filing exercise in March instead of a planning exercise in September. More than half of executives expect the new law to help their after-tax cash flow. Finding out whether yours is one of them costs you one meeting.

Where the savings are not

Slow growth plus rising costs produces a reflex in a lot of firms: freeze everything. Stop hiring, cut marketing, defer the systems investment, wait for clarity.

Underneath the freeze sits a narrower version of the same instinct, and I have watched it more times than the big one. A micro focus on spending. Snipping a little here and a chunk there. Turn off the coffee machine, downgrade the snacks, question every software renewal under $200. It feels like impact, it is visible to everyone, and it seldom moves the needle. What it does move is the mood of the people you need most.

The question worth asking is bigger and less comfortable. Where can you preserve enough cash to fund your growth and still clear at least 10 percent profit? The answers are rarely in the stationery budget. They are in the product or service lines that never took off and have been carried for three years out of loyalty to the idea. They are in the roles that made sense at half this size and have not grown with the business, including people you like. They are in the clients from the last post who have never cleared a minimum gate.

Those decisions are harder and they are worth an order of magnitude more. I understand why owners reach for the snacks first. It costs nothing emotionally, and that is exactly why it changes nothing.

Marketing spend cut in a slow year produces a pipeline gap eighteen months later, at the exact point the market recovers and your competitors are visible and you are not. Deferred investment in the systems that lower your delivery cost leaves you facing the same margin arithmetic next year with less capacity to fix it.

The disciplined move in a year like this is selective, not defensive. Fund the two or three things that lower your cost to serve or raise what you can charge. Stop funding everything that does neither. That distinction is harder than an across-the-board freeze, and it produces a better business at the far end.

The one that gets missed

Every risk above is external and none of them are yours to control. The internal one sits underneath all of them, and it decides how hard any of this hits you.

A firm where the founder is in every pricing decision, every client relationship and half the delivery cannot respond quickly to a cost shock. Not because the owner lacks judgment. Because there is one of them, and a repricing program across 60 clients, a financing review, a tax planning exercise and a client concentration analysis all need doing in the same quarter, on top of the normal running of the business.

Firms that came through 2008 and 2020 in decent condition had one thing in common in my experience, and it was not forecasting. It was a leadership group with enough capability and authority to act on four fronts at once. That capability gets built in calm years and gets tested in years like this one.

If you read the list above and your reaction was that all five need doing and there is no way to do five, that reaction is the finding. It tells you where the constraint sits, and it is not in the economy.

Sources

Figures in this article were taken from the sources below on 14 September 2026. Each entry gives the reference period the data covers and the date it was published, so you can judge how current a number is whenever you happen to read this.

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index. Reference month August 2026, released 11 September 2026. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Cost Index. Reference period March to June 2026, released 31 July 2026. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

https://www.bls.gov/eci/

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index, energy series. Twelve months through August 2026, released 11 September 2026. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/energy-prices-gasoline-electricity-and-fuel-oil-2015-present/

J.P. Morgan Global Research, US tariffs and their impact. Effective rate as of 2 September 2026. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/current-events/us-tariffs

Business loan rate ranges, indicative, current as of mid-2026. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

https://www.qualifyfinance.com/business-loan-rates

by Adrian Bray

Revenue up, profit down: the three-year pattern owners notice too late

Post 2 of 7

Here is a three-year sequence I have watched more times than I can count.

Year one: $17 million in revenue, $2 to $3 million in profit. A good business by any measure.

Year two: still $17 million. Profit under $1 million.

Year three: revenue creeps to $18 million. The business makes a loss.

Nobody in that business did anything stupid. The owner worked harder in year three than in year one. The team was the same team, mostly. Clients were satisfied. Revenue went up.

And the business lost money.

When I put those numbers up in a presentation, somebody comes to find me afterward and says their business mapped to that exact sequence. They wish they had seen it written down at the time, because they could have made the changes early enough to keep the profit moving with the revenue.

Why the top line hides it

Revenue is the number everyone asks about. Peers ask it at conferences. Bankers ask it. Your own team treats it as the scoreboard. So an owner watching $17 million become $18 million reads the direction as forward.

Profit moves slower and gets explained away one year at a time. A bad year for two clients. The office move. That hire we made early. Each explanation is true. Stacked across three years, the explanations stop being events and start describing how the business now works.

The pattern has a cause, and it is structural. Somewhere in the growth from $8 million to $17 million, the business added cost in layers: people, systems, space, management time. Each layer was justified at the point it went in, and aimed at revenue growth, seldom at sustaining the momentum already there. None of them came with a matching increase in what the business could charge or what it could deliver per person. Revenue kept climbing because the founder kept selling. Capacity to convert or deliver that revenue into margin stopped climbing at some earlier point.

2026 makes it worse, and faster

The pressure from outside is not imaginary this year, and the published numbers say something more specific than "costs are up." I checked these against the source data on 14 September 2026, and I have given the reference period for each, because a cost figure without a date attached is worth very little.

Headline inflation ran at 3.4 percent over the twelve months through August 2026, with core inflation at 2.4 percent. Employment costs for private industry workers rose 3.3 percent over the year to June 2026, and inside that, benefit costs rose 3.8 percent while wages and salaries rose 3.2 percent. Energy rose 16.3 percent over the twelve months through August. The prime rate sits at 7.50 percent, which puts an SBA 7(a) variable loan somewhere between 9.75 and 12.25 percent and a conventional term loan anywhere from 8 percent upward.

Put the first two together, because that comparison is the one that decides your margin. Your payroll is rising at 3.3 percent. Core inflation is 2.4 percent. A firm that raises rates in line with "inflation" as the number is reported has given away close to a point of margin every year without noticing, and the benefits line is running faster still.

Tariff policy keeps moving, and it moves delivered costs with it.

For a professional services firm, most of that arrives through payroll. Your people cost more this year than last, and they should. The question is whether anything else in the business moved to match.

Most firms I look at have not repriced in two years. Some have not repriced in four. Others are facing pressure from their clients not to increase rates at all. They absorbed three rounds of salary increases and passed on none of it, because the owner did not want a conversation that could cost them a client and the revenue attached to it. That single decision, repeated across a client list without anyone tracking it, accounts for a large share of the margin that went missing.

Four causes, in the order I find them

Pricing that stopped tracking cost. Rates set when your senior people cost 20 percent less than they cost today. This is where positioning on large firm experience at a lower price becomes a double-edged sword. Every project on an old rate is now a loss-maker dressed as revenue.

Scope that grew without paperwork. The client asked for one more thing. You said yes, because that is the relationship. Then they asked again. Three years later the engagement is 30 percent larger than the fee and nobody can point to when it happened.

Delivery cost drift. Work that used to be done by one person at a mid-level is now done by two people, one of them senior, because standards are inconsistent, clients are more demanding, there is an expectation that you are using AI to bring your costs down, and rework has become the new normal. This shows up nowhere on your P&L. It shows up in the gap between what a job should cost and what it does.

Management layers added faster than they paid for themselves. You promoted three people into leadership roles because the business needed leaders. They partly came off billable work. Nobody replaced the billable capacity, and the leadership contribution takes two years to show up. Both effects hit the same P&L line at the same time.

None of these look like a crisis on any given Tuesday. All four add up across a year.

What I would look at first

Before anything else, I would want job-level profitability for the last twelve months. Not by client. By engagement. Most firms at this size can produce it inside two weeks if they have decent time data, and I had one client who could do it at the touch of a button. The exercise is uncomfortable in a way that is worth the discomfort.

What comes back is almost always the same picture. A small number of engagements make most of the money. A larger number break even. And a group at the bottom, that were once great clients, including one or two of the names the founder is proudest of, loses money every month and has done so for years, because the firm outgrew those clients and the pricing never caught up.

Owners find that last group hard to look at, because the relationship is genuine and the client is decent. My view: the client is not the problem. The price is. Those are separable, and the conversation goes better than owners expect. I have yet to see a good client walk over a fair increase explained honestly. I have seen plenty of firms lose a year of profit avoiding the conversation.

Second, I would want delivery cost per unit of output for your three main service types, compared against three years ago. If it moved up more than your rates did, you have found the arithmetic.

A pricing discipline that sticks

The firms that get out of this build a review that runs on a schedule instead of on nerve. Every client is priced against a minimum gate, and no client is exempt. Not the first one you ever won, not the one who introduced you to three others, not the one whose founder you like. Any account that does not clear the gate goes on a list with a date and a plan: reprice, rescope or release.

The part that decides whether this survives contact with reality is the part most firms skip. Tell your team why the gate exists, and what it is protecting. A rule handed down without reasoning gets abandoned the first time a good client pushes back, because the person defending it has nothing to stand on. The same person, knowing the gate exists so the firm can fund the training and the hires they have been asking for, defends it without you in the room.

Your gate needs a number behind it. Most middle-market service firms I work with should be clearing 10 percent net profit at minimum, and a lot of them discover they are pricing as though 4 percent were normal.

The part that changes the direction

Owners in this position tend to reach for revenue. More marketing, more sales activity, another hire in business development. It is the familiar lever, and it has worked before.

At this stage it adds volume to a system that loses money on the margin. The business gets busier and the P&L gets worse, which is precisely the three-year sequence I described at the top.

The move that works is unglamorous. Reprice what is underpriced. Rescope what has drifted. Fix delivery cost on your two or three highest-volume service types. Then grow, into a business where the next dollar of revenue brings a predictable amount of margin with it.

Firms that do that recover margin faster than they believe possible, because none of it requires new clients, new markets, or a new plan. It requires looking at what is already there with the willingness to change terms that were set for a smaller business.

Your revenue is telling you the sales engine works. The profit line is telling you the rest of the business has not kept up with it. That is a solvable problem, and it stays solvable for as long as you have the reserves to work on it calmly. That window is the thing worth protecting.

Sources

Figures in this article were taken from the sources below on 14 September 2026. Each entry gives the reference period the data covers and the date it was published, so you can judge how current a number is whenever you happen to read this.

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index. Reference month August 2026, released 11 September 2026. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Cost Index. Reference period March to June 2026, released 31 July 2026. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

https://www.bls.gov/eci/

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index, energy series. Twelve months through August 2026, released 11 September 2026. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/energy-prices-gasoline-electricity-and-fuel-oil-2015-present/

Business loan rate ranges, indicative, current as of mid-2026. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

https://www.qualifyfinance.com/business-loan-rates

by Adrian Bray

The execution gap: why a good plan stops producing results somewhere past $12 million

Series Post 1 of 7:

Ask the owner of a $20 million professional services firm what the plan is, and you get a clean answer in under two minutes. The two markets they want more of. The three hires they know the business needs. The margin they intend to protect. The plan is sound. Most of them are.

Then ask what happened in the last ninety days against that plan. The answer takes longer and comes with more caveats.

Research across companies between $10 million and $150 million puts this at the top of the list for 2026. Leadership believes the strategy is right. The days are not delivering it. Owners describe it as an execution problem, and they are half correct. What they are looking at is a business that has outgrown the way it operates and its plan.

The plan was never the weak part

I built and exited a middle-market services business before I did this work. My plans were fine. I could describe the destination to anyone who asked, and I believed every word.

What I could not describe was who owned which outcome on a Wednesday when a client escalated, two proposals were due, and one of my senior people was three days from resigning. Everything routed back to me. Not by design. By default, because I was the only person with the whole picture in my head.

That is the condition most owners at this size are in. The business runs on the founder's judgment applied case by case. At $4 million that is an advantage. Decisions are fast, standards are consistent, clients get the founder. Somewhere past $12 million the same arrangement turns into the ceiling. There are more decisions in a week than one person can make well, and the ones that get made are the loud ones. Strategic work has no deadline and no client chasing it, so it loses every time. And when you get home and somebody asks what you want for dinner, it can be one decision request too many.

Owners read that as a discipline failure in themselves. It is arithmetic.

What the numbers say owners are chasing

Chief Executive's August 2026 CEO Confidence Index asked 285 CEOs what they are focused on for the rest of the year. Revenue and market share growth came first at 55 percent, profitability at 43 percent, operational efficiency at 38 percent. The challenge they named most was rising costs and margin pressure, at 44 percent, followed by weak or uncertain demand at 34 percent and talent shortages at 27 percent.

Look at those two lists together. Revenue and profit growth is the goal. Margin is the threat. Efficiency sits between them doing the load-bearing work, and efficiency is the one that depends entirely on execution.

Which is why the umbrella question in middle-market conversations right now sounds something like: how do we execute well enough to protect margin and still hit our numbers with this much uncertainty around us.

Four places execution breaks in a founder-led firm

I see the same four every time.

Too many priorities, none of them owned. Ask five people in a 30-person firm to list the top three priorities for the quarter and you get eleven answers. Every one of them is defensible. That is the problem. A priority that nobody can name without checking a document is not a priority, it is a preference. Three priorities with a name attached to each beats fifteen with a committee attached to all of them.

The reasoning behind the priority never leaves your head. This one gets missed almost everywhere, and it is the difference between a team that complies and a team that decides. You know why the target is $4 million in that market and not $6 million. You know which competitors you are positioning against and which you have chosen to ignore. You know what you tried in 2019 that failed and why you will not try it again. None of that gets said, because to you it is obvious. To your team it is invisible, so when circumstances change, and they will, your people have a rule with no reasoning attached and no basis for adapting it. Write the why beside every priority. It takes an afternoon, and it is the highest-leverage afternoon in the exercise.

Measurement of busyness instead of source and outcome. Utilization, pipeline count, hours logged, networking meetings attended. All useful, none of them tell you whether the thing you said you would do in January moved in March. Owners look at dashboards full of motion and cannot answer whether the strategy advanced. Pick two or three measures per priority that show how the outcome will move: qualified proposals at the standard you need, time from inquiry to close, whether you are on track against the goal, behind it or ahead of it. Activities that relate directly to an outcome and predict it are worth measuring. The rest is busy work with a chart attached.

Middle management that was promoted for technical skill. Your best consultant became a team leader because they were your best consultant, and they mirror what they observed from you, which was a much smaller business. Nobody taught them to align or run a team, set standards and expectations for other people's work, or have the conversation where someone is underperforming. The owner was never trained in any of it either, and made it up while the business was small enough to absorb the mistakes. They default to delivering it themselves, at higher cost, with less capable capacity, and the people under them stay dependent. This is the single most common structural fault I find in firms between $12 million and $50 million, and it is fixable inside a year.

None of those four are strategy problems. All four make a good strategy produce nothing.

The half of the diagnosis owners skip

Everything above is top-down. You, looking at your plan, deciding what broke.

The other half comes from your team, and it is faster and more accurate. Ask the people who deliver it where the strategy stops making sense to them. Ask which approvals they wait on, which handoffs fail, which client requests they know are unprofitable and process anyway because nobody ever told them otherwise.

You will hear about two or three things you had no idea were happening. You will also find out which of your priorities never reached the floor at all, which is the most useful twenty minutes in the quarter.

What changes when it works

A firm I worked with was around 40 people and growing faster than it could absorb. The owner was in every client relationship, every pricing decision, and most delivery. The plan was to get to the next size band. Nothing in the operation was built to carry it.

We did three things. Aligned their roles, got clear on expectations, and named an owner for each of four outcomes, with authority, responsibility and measures of success. Cut reporting down to a small number of measures that showed whether those outcomes were moving. Then spent nine months building the two people in the middle who had been promoted and abandoned.

Eighteen months later the owner was in fewer than half the client relationships and the business was bigger. The part that surprised him was not the revenue. It was that problems started getting solved before they reached his desk, and he found out about them afterward in a summary.

He described it as the business being managed instead of managing us.

The test worth running this week

Take your plan for this year. For each item on it, write down one name. Not a department, not "the leadership team", one person. Then write down the one measure that tells you it moved, and any timing expectation you have.

Then write one more line under each: why this, and why now, in the words you would use with someone you trust.

Three things happen. Some items have no name you can write with confidence, which tells you where the capability gap sits. Some have your name on them, which tells you where the business still runs through you. And some have a why you cannot put in a sentence, which tells you the priority needs another look before anybody is asked to deliver it.

That list is the honest version of your operating model. Most owners find it uncomfortable and useful in the same sitting, and nearly all of them find it faster than another strategy offsite.

The strategy is fine. The question worth your attention is whether anything in the business is built to deliver it without you in the middle of every step.

Sources

Figures in this article were taken from the sources below on 14 September 2026. Each entry gives the reference period the data covers and the date it was published, so you can judge how current a number is whenever you happen to read this.

Chief Executive, August CEO Confidence Index. Survey of 285 CEOs, fielded 4 to 5 August 2026. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

https://chiefexecutive.net/in-final-stretch-of-the-year-ceos-push-for-growth-lean-into-ai/

by Adrian Bray

What owners type into Google at eleven at night

Series Post 6 of 7:

Search data for US business owners over the last ninety days clusters into a short list. The phrases repeat almost word for word.

How much is my business worth. Business valuation calculator. How to sell my business without a broker. When is the best time to sell my business. Where to list my business for sale.

Retirement is the most cited reason owners gave for listing in 2026.

I find the timing of those searches more interesting than the wording. Nobody types "business valuation calculator" during a good week. It gets typed after a difficult client meeting, or on a Sunday night, or at the end of a year where the effort went up and the profit did not. I remember dreading Monday mornings and the line of people waiting to see me before they went off to clients. That is the frame of mind the search gets made in.

The question behind the query is rarely arithmetic.

What a calculator gives you

An online valuation tool takes your earnings, applies an industry multiple, and returns a number inside about forty seconds. The arithmetic is correct. Some will try to calibrate to your circumstances. Most do not. Talk to a valuation expert and they will walk you through the different types of valuation and all the herbs and spices that go into each one.

One note before you use one. Most of the free calculators price on seller's discretionary earnings, which is a small-business measure. A business of your size is bought on EBITDA, with adjustments, and the two produce numbers that are not comparable. If the tool asks you to add your own salary back in, it is not built for you.

The industry multiple is a market average across businesses that share your industry code and nothing else. It assumes an average level of dependence on key people, average client concentration, average quality of records, and an average management team. Your business is not average on any of those, in either direction, and that is where most of the value sits.

Two firms with identical revenue and identical profit routinely sell for numbers that differ by half. The difference is never the industry multiple. It is how the buyer calibrates the business from where they sit.

The seven things a buyer marks you down for that a calculator ignores

1. Owner or key person dependence. The first question in every diligence process, asked in a dozen different ways. What happens to this business the day the founder stops answering the phone, or a key staff member leaves because of the sale, or the leadership team turns out to be planning to retire the day after you do. If client relationships, pricing judgment and technical sign-off route through one person, the buyer is purchasing that person's employment agreement and pricing accordingly. This is the largest single discount I see applied for internal factors, and the one most within your control.
2. Client concentration. One client at 25 percent of revenue produces questions, and any client at 10 percent or more gets examined. One at 40 percent produces a deal structure where most of the money depends on that client staying for three years after the sale, and perhaps after you have gone.
3. Direction of margin. A buyer looks at five years, not one. Revenue flat and margin falling tells them the business has a cost problem the seller has not fixed. They will assume they are buying the problem and price it in. Revenue flat and margin improving tells a different story about how the business is run, and it is the single most persuasive thing in a data room.
4. Quality of the numbers. Personal expenses running through the company are expected, and so are reasonable adjustments to back them out. What costs you money is revenue recognized inconsistently, no job-level or client-level profitability, and a close that takes six weeks. Every one of those extends diligence, and every additional week gives a buyer another opportunity to renegotiate as their confidence in the quality of the business erodes.
5. Depth of the management team. Not whether you have titles. Whether the second layer can run their part without you, whether they will support the growth the buyer's further investment will demand, whether they will stay, and whether they fit the buyer's culture. A buyer will want them locked in and incentivized, and their willingness to sign depends on how they feel about the business they are being asked to stay in.
6. Revenue you can predict. Contracted and recurring revenue prices higher than project work sold one engagement at a time, for the obvious reason. Firms that convert part of their delivery to retained arrangements two or three years before a sale change their own multiple.
7. Warranties and liabilities nobody disclosed. A staff issue that gets sharper the moment people sense change coming. A delivery mistake with a client that was smoothed over and never documented. A licensing question that got swept under the table three years ago. All of these bite hard in the final deal structure, and they bite late, when your negotiating position is at its weakest.

Six of those seven take between one and three years to move, and they do not all move in parallel. Margin direction alone needs enough years of statements behind it for a buyer looking back five. You will see several of these recur across this series, because they count.

On the timing question

When is the best time to sell has two answers, and the one people want is the market answer. That one needs unpacking, because the headline is misleading.

The figures below were checked on 14 September 2026. Global M&A deal value is running about 13 percent ahead of last year. Deal volume is about 13 percent behind it. Transactions above $5 billion now make up 48 percent of all deal value, against 39 percent last year and 26 percent the year before. Strip those megadeals out and the market is down 4 percent. EY reports the same split in the US, where large-cap transactions are outpacing the middle market.

So when you read that M&A is booming, that headline is being carried by a small number of very large transactions in technology, power and life sciences. The market you would sell into is quieter than the coverage suggests, with wider valuation gaps and a private equity exit backlog that has buyers being choosy about what they take on.

That is not a reason to wait. It is a reason to be the kind of business that gets chosen in a selective market. All of it is worth knowing and none of it should drive your decision.

The answer that decides your outcome: the best time to sell is three or more years after you begin preparing, and the preparation is the same work that makes the business better to own in the meantime.

Buyers' acquisition cycles rarely align themselves to sellers' retirement dates. Being prepared ahead of time is what lets you take good inbound interest seriously when it arrives instead of scrambling, develop your people toward an employee sale, or give a family member a business worth stepping into.

That is the reason I keep pushing owners toward it. Reducing dependence on key people, fixing margin direction, cleaning up the numbers, building the second layer, adding predictable revenue, and grooming successors. Every item on that list improves your life if you never sell. There is no version of this where the preparation is wasted.

Owners who sell without preparing tend to discover the discount during diligence, which is the worst point to find out, because by then they have told their team, told their family, and spent nine months on a process they no longer want to walk away from.

On selling without a broker

It shows up in search because the fees are visible and the value is not.

My view: for a business under about $2 million in revenue, doing it yourself may be defensible depending on the circumstances, and the reality is that money gets left on the table. I am not a fan of the do-it-yourself approach. Above that, the mistakes available to a first-time seller negotiating alone against a buyer who does this professionally cost more than the fee. Working capital adjustments, earnout definitions, indemnity caps, what counts as a material adverse change. Those clauses decide how much of the headline number reaches your bank account, and a first-time seller has no basis for knowing which ones are standard.

What you should not outsource is the preparation. A broker takes the business to market. They will not build your management team or fix your margin in the twelve to thirty weeks before a listing.

The question underneath the search

An owner searching for a valuation calculator at eleven at night is rarely planning a transaction. Most are asking whether the last twenty years added up to something, and the number is a proxy for that.

It is an understandable way to ask and it gives a poor answer, because the number a calculator returns tells you almost nothing about your business specifically.

A better version of the same question, and one you can answer yourself: if I stopped tomorrow, what would this business be worth to somebody who has never met me, and could I live on that for what people insist on calling my retirement. The gap between that and what it is worth with you in it is the size of the project in front of you.

That gap closes with work you control. And it closes in the same direction as everything else you want, which is a business that runs, a team that decides, and a Monday you look forward to.

Questions owners ask

How much is my business worth?

A middle-market services firm is valued on adjusted EBITDA multiplied by a market multiple, and the multiple is set by what a buyer finds in diligence, not by your industry average. Two firms with identical revenue and identical profit routinely sell for numbers that differ by half. Dependence on key people is the largest single discount.

Are online business valuation calculators accurate?

The arithmetic is correct and the inputs are wrong for a firm your size. Most free calculators price on seller's discretionary earnings, which is a small-business measure. A middle-market business is bought on adjusted EBITDA. If the tool asks you to add your own salary back in, it was not built for you.

What multiple will my business sell for?

Published industry multiples are averages across companies that share nothing with you except an industry code. They assume average owner dependence, average client concentration, average quality of records and an average management team. Your multiple moves up or down from that average on those four things, and you control all of them.

What reduces the value of my business?

Seven things: dependence on you or another key person, client concentration above 10 percent, margin falling across five years, financial records that need explaining, a thin management team, project revenue with nothing contracted, and undisclosed liabilities. The last group appears late in diligence, when your negotiating position is at its weakest.

When is the best time to sell my business?

Three or more years after you begin preparing. Six of the seven factors a buyer prices take one to three years to move, and margin direction needs longer still, because a buyer looks back five years. Market conditions in any given year are worth knowing and should not drive the decision.

How long does it take to get a business ready to sell?

Three years is the floor. Reducing dependence on key people takes about a year for day-to-day decisions and closer to three for a second layer a buyer would rely on. Cleaning up financial records takes months. Improving margin enough to show a trend takes the longest of all.

Can I sell my business without a broker?

Under about $2 million in revenue it can be defensible, and money still gets left on the table. Above that, a first-time seller negotiating alone against a professional buyer loses more on working capital adjustments, earnout definitions and indemnity caps than the fee would have cost. Preparation is the part you should never outsource.

Sources

Figures in this article were taken from the sources below on 14 September 2026. Each entry gives the reference period the data covers and the date it was published, so you can judge how current a number is whenever you happen to read this.

PwC, Global M&A Industry Trends. Mid-year outlook covering 1 January to 31 May 2026, with full-year projections. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/deals/trends.html

EY, US M&A activity report. Covering May to July 2026, published 24 August 2026. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

https://www.ey.com/en_us/insights/mergers-acquisitions/m-and-a-activity-report

US search trend data for business owners, June to September 2026, from the underlying research compiled for this series.

by Adrian Bray

The exit question that never appears in a valuation report

Post 7 of 7

Most exit planning content answers a question about money. Multiples, deal structures, tax treatment, earnouts. All of it useful.

None of it addresses the thing I hear most in a first conversation with a founder who built a firm people like working at.

Something close to: I know I should be thinking about my exit, and every time I do, I picture standing in front of my team and telling them I sold them to the kind of organization we all left.

Owners say a version of that in a lower voice than the rest of the conversation. A number of them have said they would close the business before they would do it. I believe them, and I think it would be a waste of twenty years.

And it is emotional, which the deal literature tends to skip past. Their identity is entwined with the business. For a lot of owners this is their life's work, and nobody sells their life's work the way they sell a building.

Why the question arrives so late

Exit gets treated as a transaction, and a transaction has a date. Owners assume the thinking belongs in the year before the date, so it sits in a drawer.

By the time it comes out, the options have already been decided by things that happened years earlier. Who will buy your business, and on what terms, is determined by how the business is built. Not by what you want when you decide you are ready.

That is the part worth moving forward. Your list of acceptable buyers is something you construct over several years, and most owners construct it by accident.

The five ways out, and what each one does to your team

1. Sale to a larger firm in your industry. The most common route and the one that produces the outcome founders describe fearing. The buyer wants your clients and your capability, especially if they are private equity backed and building toward a scalable enterprise. They have their own systems, their own rates, their own middle management, and a cost case that involves some of your people leaving. Your culture lasts about eighteen months. Some acquirers are thoughtful about this and a few are excellent. Most are not, and you find out afterward.
2. Sale to a financial buyer. Private equity and family offices, treating your firm as a platform. Priced on cash flow and growth, with a horizon of three to seven years and an exit of their own in mind. Worth knowing before you talk to one: the industry is carrying a substantial backlog of companies it bought years ago and has not yet sold. A firm under pressure to return capital to its own investors behaves differently from one at the start of a fund, and the difference reaches you through how hard they push on targets. Less immediately disruptive to culture than a competitor, in most cases, because they need your people to run it, assuming your people can absorb the add-on businesses that will arrive behind you. The pressure comes through targets and through what happens at their exit, which you no longer control. For an owner who wants to stay involved and take a second bite, this route deserves serious consideration. For an owner who wants out cleanly and wants the culture untouched at year five, it is uncertain.
3. Management buyout. Your leadership group buys the business, funded by a mix of debt, seller financing and their own money. The culture survives because the people who built it are the people running it. Two conditions decide whether this is available to you. You need a management group capable of running the business without you, and you need profitability strong enough to service the debt. Both take years to build. Owners who want this option and start thinking about it eighteen months out find it is not there.
4. Employee ownership. An ESOP or a trust structure. Broader than a management buyout, with tax treatment in the US that is worth understanding properly. Complex to establish, and it suits firms with stable cash flow, a strong culture, a long time horizon, and a management team already in place. For founders whose main concern is what happens to the people, this route answers the question more directly than any other.
5. Family or internal succession. Depends entirely on whether the person exists and wants it. When it works it is the cleanest continuation of what you built. When it is assumed and never tested, it produces the most painful outcomes I have seen.

The point most owners miss

Read that list again and notice what three of the five have in common.

The management buyout, employee ownership and internal succession all require the same thing: a leadership group who can run the business without you, and financials strong enough to carry a funding structure.

If you do not have those, your available options reduce to selling to a larger firm or a financial buyer. Which is to say, the two routes that carry the most risk to the thing you are protecting.

An owner who spends three years building a second layer and improving margin has five ways out. An owner who spends those three years in delivery has two, and one of them is the scenario that keeps coming up at eleven at night.

The preparation that widens your options is identical to the preparation that makes the business better to own. That is the part I keep coming back to across this series, because it removes the trade-off people assume is there. You are not choosing between a good business now and a good exit later. The same project produces both.

What I would do three years out, at the latest

Name the outcome you want, in terms of people and not money. Say it out loud to someone. "I want the team intact and the name on the door in five years" leads somewhere different from "I want the highest number and I will accept what follows." Both are legitimate. Owners who have not chosen end up with whichever the market hands them.

Test your assumptions about who might take it on. If you have assumed a family member or a senior colleague will step up, find out, and find out quickly. That conversation is uncomfortable and it is far less costly now than in year three of a process.

Build the second layer regardless of route. Every option improves with it, including the sale to a larger firm, because a buyer paying for a business that runs itself pays more and interferes less. And tell that group why you are doing it. People who understand the reasoning behind a transition prepare for it. People handed a set of new responsibilities with no explanation assume the worst, and some of them leave at the point you can least afford it.

Fix the direction of your margin. It decides the number, it decides whether a management buyout can be funded at all, and a buyer will be looking back five years, so this is the item with the longest lead time on the list.

Get your records to a standard where diligence is dull. Boring diligence is the cheapest thing you can buy.

Three years is the floor, not the target. Buyers' timetables never match sellers' plans, and readiness is what lets you say yes to something good that arrives early.

The last thing

You built a business so that people could do good work without being ground down. That was the point of leaving, and it has been the standard ever since.

Nothing about wanting a strong financial outcome contradicts it. You spent twenty years making sure everyone else did well out of this. Wanting it to be worth something for you at the end is not a departure from your values. It is the reason the sacrifice made sense.

The owners who get both are the ones who started three years earlier than they thought they needed to.

I work with a small number of owners at a time, because this kind of work does not divide well across a large client list. If anything in this series described your situation closely enough to be uncomfortable, a conversation costs you an hour and you will leave it with a clearer view of where you stand, whether or not we work together.

Sources

Figures in this article were taken from the sources below on 14 September 2026. Each entry gives the reference period the data covers and the date it was published, so you can judge how current a number is whenever you happen to read this.

PwC, Global M&A Industry Trends. Mid-year outlook covering 1 January to 31 May 2026, on the private equity exit backlog. Retrieved 14 September 2026.

https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/deals/trends.html

by Adrian Bray