Making value visible before exit

John Thompson, Founder, Burway Group, Andy Knox , Senior Adviser to Burway Group

The final years of a hold period are usually defined by operational focus: sharpening performance, proving resilience and building the next layer of growth. But there is another part of exit preparation that often gets less structured attention: making sure what has been built is properly understood by the people who will ultimately price it. 

By the time a business comes to market, buyers are not simply diligencing historical performance. They are underwriting what happens next. In doing so, they piece together a view of the business from multiple signals: management credibility, market positioning, customer proof points, category leadership and the broader external narrative around the asset. 

The stronger those signals are, and the earlier they start to build, the easier it is for buyers to underwrite duration, resilience and future upside with conviction. 

Precise and cumulative 

A curious feature of private equity is that the better a portfolio company becomes, the less likely it is to spend time positioning those new strengths with the audiences that will determine its success on exit. Management is building, hiring, integrating, executing. Positioning, profile building and shaping external understanding often gets deferred until the final stretch. 

With hold periods longer and the stock of available assets significantly larger, it is a buyers’ market. Buyers remain selective. They do not want to buy a peak or a snapshot. They pay a premium for legible duration: a credible growth trajectory they can underwrite across different scenarios. 

Against that backdrop, exit narratives need to be accumulated, not assembled. 

This work sits alongside, not instead of, the investment team’s operational value creation and the banker’s process expertise. What strategy and communications advisers add is something specific: distilling operational progress into a sharper, externally legible equity story that starts shaping buyer perception before launch. 

We see this often in our work with portfolio companies. The value is there. The challenge is usually precision. Deciding which parts of the story matter most to the next buyer, and making sure those are the parts the market sees clearly. 

Growth and resilience 

With median hold periods now around seven years, the risk is that the productivity gains of years one to four are already in the rear-view mirror by the time an asset comes to market. 

That matters for price...

European PE data from 2025 suggests assets growing at more than 25% revenue CAGR on a six year trailing basis sold at a 50% valuation premium to those growing at less than 5%. 

Momentum still commands a premium. But buyers are looking harder at what sits underneath it. TPG made the point plainly on its 2025 earnings call: businesses underwritten before 2021 carry materially higher AI disruption risk because their competitive positions were built for a different market. 

Growth alone no longer carries the argument. 

Buyers want to know whether advantage survives under pressure. Whether retention holds. Whether product depth increases. Whether data compounds. Whether the business still wins as the category shifts. 

This is where businesses often undersell themselves. They lead with broad market opportunity when buyers are looking for resilience, defensibility and proof that the next chapter is still there.

Human capital as competitive moat 

The pattern is even clearer in management teams. 

Buyers pay a premium for leadership teams with a track record in their category. Teams that have articulated their strategic thesis, tested it with the market and built credibility with customers and peers are easier to underwrite than teams that appear fully formed only in a sale memorandum.

Private equity is rightly sceptical of profile-building for its own sake.

But there is a difference between profile and credibility. 

The best management teams know how to explain where the business sits in its market, why it wins and where it goes next. 

That clarity reduces uncertainty. And uncertainty is expensive.

What a compounding narrative looks like in practice

In practice, GPs usually bring us in around two years before exit. That reflects where this work fits naturally in the value creation cycle.

Alongside the operational work being driven by the investment team, we work with management to sharpen the core value proposition, stress-test how it maps to customer, commercial and talent outcomes, clarify market positioning and pressure-test the future growth story against the questions sophisticated buyers will ask.

The result is usually not more messaging. It is less, said with greater precision. 

That gets carried through management presentations, customer case studies, thought leadership, strategic content and the wider external narrative around the business. 

The investment team knows the business. The bankers know the process. What we add is the translation layer: making sure the right evidence is visible, coherent and building in the market long enough to land with authority when the formal process starts. 

We see repeatedly that the strongest outcomes tend to come when this work starts earlier. Not because the story changes, but because the market has had time to absorb it. 

The translation premium 

Financial track record establishes credibility. It does not establish premium on its own. 

The indicators that move valuation are often leading, not lagging: retention, market penetration, data, talent and commercial productivity against category benchmarks. 

These are not communications artefacts. 

No serious buyer writes a bigger cheque because of a conference appearance or a polished article. But over time, a disciplined communications programme makes those realities easier to see and easier to price. 

It connects the metrics to the mechanics of the business, and the mechanics to the durability of future returns.

In a market where AI has made buyers more sceptical of claimed advantage, where hold periods are longer and where future outcomes are harder to call, that translation has become more important. 

Buyers pay a premium for businesses they recognise, respect and understand. 

The strongest exits are rarely the best-hidden stories.