Talk with Alex →
Talk with Alex →
For business coaches
Owners may not know when, how, or whether they will step away. The decisions they make today decide what options they will have later. You are already in those decisions.
The missing conversation
Growth, people, margins, systems, owner dependence. You are already in those conversations.
One context usually goes unspoken.
Most owners will talk all day about leadership depth, operating consistency, customer stability, and how much of the company still runs through them.
Fewer want to talk about selling, stepping away, or what comes next. They may not know when they want to leave, whether they want to, who should own the company after them, or what they would do with themselves. Most owners sit there for a while. It is a normal place to be.
Meanwhile, the decisions they are making today are already shaping what choices will exist later. Leadership depth, customer concentration, and owner dependence are all part of transferable value. The coach is helping shape it, whether or not anyone has said the words.
Why the coach
The owner already trusts you. You already have recurring time with them. You already help guide the decisions that matter. Nobody else has that seat.
You do not need to become an M&A expert. You need a better lens and a few better questions. The Method gives you a way to raise transferability without pushing the owner into an exit conversation they are not ready for.
Don't solve the transaction.
Surface the decisions that shape it.
Transferable value
Transferable value is what lets an owner take any of these paths. A business with durable earnings that does not run through the owner can support more than one of them.
A buyer pays for earnings they believe will continue after the owner is gone. Durable earnings and a leadership team that runs the company are what they are paying for.
The people already running the business buy it over time. That only works when they can carry the relationships and the decisions without the owner in the middle.
The owner holds the company and steps out of day-to-day operations. The business has to run, and keep earning, without them at the center of it.
The owner does not have to decide which path today.
They can start building a business that gives them better options when the time comes.
The instrument
The Transferable Value Index is twelve questions an owner can answer from memory in about four minutes. It measures two things: how durable the earnings are, and how much of the company runs through the owner. It carries your name, and the report goes to both of you.
The owner takes the Index under your link. The report gives you both a baseline and names where the business leans on the owner.
You now have a shared language for a conversation that was hard to start. The report points at the dependencies. You ask the questions.
Each dependency becomes a coaching thread inside the work you are already doing. Nothing new to sell the client on.
Retake it when the work has had time to show. Watch whether the business is becoming more transferable.
The Index is not a valuation. A valuation asks what the business may be worth today.
The Index shows whether the characteristics that support transferability are improving over time. That is the question a coach can actually work on.
Who we are
At The McFarland Group, businesses arrive when the owner is ready to transition. By then, whether the company can carry its value to someone else was decided years earlier, in ordinary operating decisions.
The Method brings that perspective upstream, to the coach, while there is still time to shape the outcome.
BMMore than twenty years guiding closely held businesses through ownership transitions, and more than $3B in business value through the process. Author of The Bankable Buyer.
AMBuilt the Transferable Value Index with Byron. Three-time founder, including Persevus, a firm designed to recruit the people that make transferable value possible.
The community
Coaches using the Method compare notes in a LinkedIn group: what they are seeing across their clients, anonymized situations, and how others bring transferable value into a client conversation without forcing it.
It is new and it is small. It is where the practice gets sharper.
McFarland Method | Coaches Building Transferable Value on LinkedIn.
Talk with Alex
You can still help them get more prepared for whatever comes next. If that sounds like a conversation worth having, Alex would like to hear what you are seeing with your clients.
Or email alex@themcfarlandgroup.com.