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You are about to hand the most important transaction of your life to a planner, and you have no way to tell a great one from a confident salesperson. This is a short review of your seven pre-work artifacts, and the questions to put to a planner before you sign their engagement letter, so you choose the right one and brief them well instead of being led.
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Why you need it
The Pre-Planner Review is a short, structured review of your seven pre-work artifacts, ending in the specific questions to ask an exit planner before you sign. It does two things: it pressure-tests whether your own pre-work is actually ready, and it arms you with the questions that reveal, in one meeting, whether a planner is the right fit or just the most polished.
You will sign this engagement once, and you will sign it knowing far less than the person across the table. The review closes that gap before you commit.
Exit planners are not interchangeable, and the difference does not show up in the pitch. It shows up in how they answer hard questions you do not yet know to ask: about incentive alignment, about who controls the timeline, about what happens when the deal and your day-after document conflict. Walk in with those questions and the meeting tells you everything. Walk in without them and you choose on confidence and rapport, which is how owners end up with a planner optimizing for a deal they did not actually want.
What you get
01 · Preparedness check
A review of your day-after documents, floor number, walk-away lines, and de-keying state, to find the gaps a planner would exploit or stumble on. You fix them before the planner sees them, not after.
02 · The question set
The specific questions on incentives, control, timeline, and conflict that separate a planner who serves your interests from one who serves the transaction. Asked early, they do the screening for you.
03 · The red flags
For each question, what a good answer and a worrying one sound like, so you can review the business in real time instead of realizing months later that the answer was a dodge.
Who it is for
If you have done the pre-work and you are choosing a planner or a banker to run the transaction, this is the review that makes you a sharp buyer of that service. It is for the window between finishing your own pre-work and signing someone else's engagement letter.
It is not for someone who has not done the pre-work yet. The review is of your artifacts; if they do not exist, start with the manual and the Day-After Document Pack. And if you already have a planner you trust, you do not need this.
Use it now
This is a real review of your real artifacts, so it is limited by how many can run at once. It is timed to a specific moment, the weeks before you sign a planner, which is exactly when it is worth the most.
If you are at that moment, apply. The pre-planner review runs inside the coaching engagement first, and the standalone version opens to that list as capacity allows.
What this is not
The review helps you pick the right transaction team and brief them sharply. It does not engineer the deal, run the process, or negotiate the terms, and it is not a substitute for the exit planner, banker, and lawyer you will hire. It makes sure the people you hire are the right ones and that you walk in informed. The manual names that line, and the coaching is where the owner-side judgment behind the choice gets tested.
Back to the manual →When the work is live
Application-gated. Scoped quote requests are reviewed before larger work begins. The review is hands-on and capacity-bound; coaching clients get it first.
Apply for business coachingBusiness Coaching: Monthly $750 · Ongoing Coaching quoted after scope · Pricing
