For Kelly Grandmaison, the most frustrating client conversations involve businesses that look perfectly healthy on paper. Clean financials, strong revenue, loyal clients, and somewhere between the letter of intent and the closing table, the whole thing unravels.
Grandmaison is the co-founder of the business consulting company Impact Ventures International and one of the Los Angeles Business Journal’s 2025 Women of Influence in Finance. She has spent years working with business owners across entertainment, sports, construction, and medical services, and her explanation for why so many exits fail is not the one most financial consultants reach for.
“Owners carry a deep personal relationship with their business that most consultants never account for,” Grandmaison mentions. “The financial plan looks perfect on paper, and then the deal falls apart at the last minute because the person selling it was never actually ready to let go, and nobody in the room had prepared them for that moment.”
The Problem Behind the Problem
According to the Exit Planning Institute’s State of Owner Readiness research, between 70% and 80% of small businesses that go to market never sell, a figure that has held steady for years and cuts across industries, company sizes, and market conditions. The standard diagnosis points to valuation gaps, operational weaknesses, or poor timing, and while those factors are real, Grandmaison argues they tend to be symptoms of something that has been accumulating much earlier in the business’s life.
Most founders build companies around themselves, not through deliberate choice but through years of small, rational decisions. They manage client relationships personally because it helps them close deals faster. They retain final decision-making authority because it produces better short-term outcomes. They put off documenting internal processes because the business is growing and there are more pressing matters to address.
Grandmaison shares that none of those choices is wrong in isolation, but over time, they produce a business that is structurally inseparable from the person running it, which is precisely what makes it difficult to sell.
“I’ve sat across from owners who built something genuinely impressive,” she shares. “Millions in revenue, loyal clients, strong teams. And the business is entirely dependent on them being in the room every day. A buyer looks at that and sees a liability, not an asset.”
What Kills Deals That Should Close
The operational problem, the owner dependency, is fixable given time and the right structure. The psychological dimension is considerably harder to address, and in Grandmaison’s experience, it is the one that quietly derails more transactions than any due diligence issue ever does.
Founders who have spent years, sometimes decades, building a business around a personal vision tend to enter the exit process with a set of questions that no financial model addresses. What happens to the people they hired? What does stepping away mean for who they are outside of the company?
These are not irrational concerns, but they have a way of surfacing at the worst possible moments: in how a founder responds to buyer questions, in negotiations that stall over points that should not be contentious, and in last-minute reversals that leave everyone at the table confused about what went wrong.
Grandmaison’s academic background in psychology and sociology, paired with her financial licensing and Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA) certification, allows her to see the problem’s dimension that most consultants only see in the spreadsheet.
IVI integrates personal financial planning, family considerations, and long-term life goals into the exit strategy from the start of an engagement, using the Rockefeller Method to build multigenerational wealth planning alongside operational work. The logic is straightforward: a founder who has already thought clearly about what their financial life looks like after a transaction is in a fundamentally different position during negotiations than one who is confronting those questions for the first time mid-deal.
“If someone tries to sell you a financial product or solution without understanding your entire picture,” Grandmaison explains, “they’re not serving your best interests.“
Starting Before It Feels Urgent
The business exit planning market has expanded considerably in recent years as a growing number of business owners approach ownership transitions, and the industry has moved toward earlier intervention as a standard of practice. IVI’s CEPA program works with owners years before any transaction is on the table, targeting enterprise value increases of up to 10 times current valuation and building toward the highest achievable industry multiple rather than an acceptable floor.
For owners working within a tighter timeframe, VentureMax360 focuses on operational restructuring and valuation acceleration within a 12 to 18 month window, addressing the structural dependencies that would otherwise limit what a buyer is willing to pay.
Both programs rest on the same premise, that the decisions which determine the outcome of an exit are made long before the exit itself, and that waiting until a sale feels necessary is already waiting too long. “My goal is so that none of my clients fit in the 70 to 80 percent of businesses that do not sell,” Grandmaison says. “I want to change that statistic across the industry.”
A Change in Perspective
What Grandmaison ultimately argues is that a business cannot truly look strong on paper if its owner is not equally prepared for what comes next. Healthy financials, recurring revenue, and a loyal client base may signal value to the market, but long-term strength also depends on whether the person behind the company is willing to face every possibility the business may require, including succession, transition, or an eventual exit.
In her view, openness to those conversations is not a sign of detachment. It is a sign of stewardship, discipline, and a clear understanding of what it takes to build something that can endure beyond its founder.
That is why Grandmaison’s work extends far beyond improving valuation or positioning a company for a successful sale. She sees her role as helping owners and leaders understand the clearest, healthiest path forward for both the business and themselves, whether that path leads to growth, transition, or exit. In that sense, fixing the person before the business is not a slogan but the foundation of a stronger outcome: when owners are prepared mentally, financially, and emotionally, the business is far more likely to achieve its maximum impact and, if the time comes, its best possible exit.