There is a version of your school that exists on paper. Clean books, documented operations, a head instructor whose name the parents actually trust.

Most owners have never met that version. They have only ever met the one that requires them to show up.

In August, Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable for about $1.285 billion. Airtable was running roughly $480 million in annual recurring revenue as of June 2026 and growing north of 20 percent a year, which puts the deal at about 2.7 times revenue. In 2021 that same company carried a valuation above $11 billion.

For fifteen years, software was where patient capital went to get rich. Buy recurring revenue, hold it, exit at a fat multiple. AI has quietly torn a hole in that thesis, because a product that took forty engineers to build in 2019 now takes four, and buyers have adjusted what they will pay for code accordingly.

Capital does not disappear when a thesis breaks. It moves. And it moves toward the things that are hardest to replicate, which right now means businesses built on a human being standing in a room with another human being. Face to face service is one of the few categories AI cannot quietly hollow out from the inside. That should tell you something about where acquisition interest drifts over the next several years, and our industry is not as far outside that conversation as most of us assume.

Which is only good news if you have something to sell them.

I have sold a few companies now, and I have watched friends sell theirs. The opening question from a buyer is almost never about top line. It is some version of: what exactly is your role here, and what happens when you are gone.

They are pricing key man risk. In their model, an owner who is woven into daily operations is a liability the buyer inherits on day one. I have watched owners pull an extra turn of multiple purely because they were not involved in the day to day. On a small deal that is an extra few hundred thousand dollars. On a business with real EBITDA it runs into the millions.

I brought this up on the leadership call a couple weeks back from the other direction. When everything in the building runs through your hands, you have not built ownership. You have built a very expensive job that you cannot quit, cannot get sick in, and cannot sell.

I ran our owners through this on a call a couple of weeks ago and the room got quiet fast. Four questions. Write your answers down instead of thinking them, because thinking them lets you negotiate with yourself.

One. Can it run without you. Could the school operate for thirty straight days with you completely unreachable. If the answer is no, you do not own an asset, you own a job, and an expensive one.

Two. Is what makes you special written down. Your processes, your standards, your way of handling the moments that matter. Either those live in documented SOPs and video training, or they live in your head, and anything living in your head cannot be handed to anyone.

Three. Can it be transferred. Do the members belong to the school or do they belong to you personally. This one is easy to test and hard to hear the answer to.

Four. Can it be priced. Are the books clean enough that somebody could actually put a value on this business without hiring a forensic accountant first.

Four yeses means you have something to sell. Anything less and the rest of this is for you.

Start with the first one, because it is the cheapest valuation you will ever get and you can run it in about four seconds.

Could your school operate for thirty consecutive days with you completely unreachable. No calls, no texts, no email, no quick check-in from the airport. Not thriving necessarily. Just running, without burning down.

Most owners know the answer before they finish reading the question, and most of them immediately start explaining why their situation is different. The explanation is the finding. When the answer is no, the school is not an asset, and the thirty-day test is the cheapest valuation you will ever get.

Question two lands in the same place from a different angle. If the way you run the front desk, handle a cancellation, structure a class, or prep a black belt candidate lives only in your memory, then there is nothing to hand to a buyer, a successor, or a manager. You are not selling a business at that point. You are offering to sell someone a job you have already decided you do not want.

Years back, when I first started running a school out here in Arizona and another instructor stepped onto the floor, the parents asked which days I was teaching, because they liked my classes best. I took it as a compliment at the time. It is worth hearing what it actually said, which is that the members belonged to me rather than to the school.

Compare that to Josh and Nicole, two of our mastermind owners who currently run their school in Canada from Arizona. That is only possible because the loyalty sits with the brand and the system instead of a face.

At MUV, we demoted a head coach and he eventually left. A handful of parents asked questions. Nobody walked. That outcome had nothing to do with luck, it came from having a trained bench and a documented way of teaching, so responsibility transfers between people without the customer experience dropping.

Now the one that stings, and I am guilty as charged on this one.

Most school owners run their books with exactly one goal, which is to pay less tax. Car through the business. Meals through the business. Whatever the accountant will let you get away with. I did all of it with my first business. That is a defensible strategy right up until somebody wants to buy from you, at which point every personal expense you buried shows up as a business expense, your profit on paper collapses, and your valuation collapses with it.

Cleaning that up after the fact costs thousands in accounting fees and months of time, and buyers get impatient while it happens. Deals die in that gap. When I sold my first business I left money on the table for exactly this reason, because I had never decided what the end goal was.

MUV is not for sale and I have no plan to sell it in the next three years. There is still not one personal expense on that profit and loss statement. Not a car, not a meal, nothing. We are heading toward more locations and eventually franchising, and franchisees will want to see what a corporate location actually produces. Clean books stopped being a selling activity for me. They are a permanent posture that keeps every door open, including the ones I do not know about yet.

Gilbert, Arizona. November 5 through 7 at Kiln Gilbert. Two full days of hot seats with the four Impakt coaches, real work on enrollment and retention, and time on developing your leadership and your staff. Friday night we run a social for the whole team, because the conversations that actually change something usually happen after the room breaks up.

Miami. February 19 and 20, 2027. Same format, same fifty seats.

Everything above is a diagnosis. The hot seat is where it turns into a plan. You put the thing that keeps breaking in front of a room of operators who are running their own schools this same week, and they tell you what they see. Nobody in that room is selling you anything. Every one of them is going home to a schedule and a team on Monday, same as you.

Both tickets include admission, materials, meals during the sessions, and the post-event playbook. Fifty seats per city, and Gilbert is the one with a deadline on it.

CLAIM YOUR GILBERT SEAT

GET IN EARLY ON MIAMI

Most owners have never had their school evaluated the way a buyer would evaluate it, and hiring someone to do it costs real money. This prompt runs a rough version of that assessment in about ten minutes. It will not replace a valuation, and it will surface the specific things that would kill a deal or crush a multiple, which is the part that actually changes what you do next.

Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT.

You are a private equity analyst who evaluates acquisitions of local service businesses. I own a martial arts school. Run a sellability assessment on my business.

Ask me the following questions ONE AT A TIME. Wait for my answer before asking the next one. Do not skip ahead. Do not offer commentary between questions.

1. What was your total revenue and your total profit over the last twelve months? 2. Are there any personal expenses running through the business, and roughly how much per year? 3. If you were completely unreachable for thirty days, what specifically would break first? 4. Which parts of how you run the school exist only in your head, with no written SOP or video training? 5. How many of your instructors could teach your highest-value class at your standard tomorrow with no notice? 6. If your head instructor quit today, what percentage of students would you expect to lose? 7. Who currently handles lead follow-up, sales conversations, and billing issues? 8. How many months of clean, third-party bookkeeping do you have available?

After my final answer, produce the following.

A. A SELLABILITY SCORE out of 100, broken into four categories: owner dependence, documentation, transferability, financial clarity.

B. DEAL KILLERS: the specific findings that would cause a buyer to walk away entirely.

C. MULTIPLE KILLERS: the findings that would not kill a deal but would reduce what a buyer pays, with an estimate of how much.

D. THE NEXT NINETY DAYS: the three highest leverage fixes, ranked by impact on valuation, with what done looks like for each.

Be blunt. Do not soften findings. I am not your client, I am the asset.

Run this once now and save the output. Run it again in ninety days against the same eight questions and compare the two scores. The gap between them is the only honest measure of whether you spent the quarter building a business or working a shift.

Cris Rodriguez breaks down three myths school owners keep repeating to themselves, and the reason they are so sticky is that every one of them sounds noble out loud. Nobody defends a bad belief by admitting it is a bad belief. They defend it by calling it integrity. Worth watching with a pen, because at least one of these is probably running your pricing right now.

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Allen DePena has a new book out, and this one belongs on the shelf for owners and staff alike. Most of us buy the book, read it alone, underline the good parts, and never mention it again to the people who actually needed it. I got a school to $84,000 a month by reading one chapter a week with my team and talking about it, so I am biased toward anything that gives you weeks of real conversation.

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Black Wolf Leadership breaks down the difference between managing the work and leading the people. Most school owners lean hard into one side and quietly resent the other, and the tell is whether your team brings you problems or hides them. Both jobs are yours. Neither one gets to be the excuse for skipping the other.

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That is the share of businesses that go to market and actually sell.

(Source: Exit Planning Institute, State of Owner Readiness)

Seven or eight out of every ten owners who decide to sell do not find a buyer. The common misreading is that those businesses failed. They did not. Most of them were profitable, respected, and busy on the day they were listed. They failed the transfer, which is a different test entirely. A buyer is not purchasing last year's revenue, they are purchasing next year's revenue happening without the person who generated it, and the majority of owner-operated businesses cannot demonstrate that.

Now the second number. The Exit Planning Institute also puts roughly 80 percent of a typical owner's net worth inside their business. Stack the two together and the picture gets sharp. Most of what you own is sitting inside an asset that has a seven-in-ten chance of never converting to cash. That is not a retirement plan. That is a position you cannot exit, and you have been adding to it for fifteen years.

So here is where it lands. Sometime in the next few weeks you will sit down and look at your profit and loss statement. Somewhere on that page is a car payment, or a stack of meals, or a phone bill, all of it there to shave a few thousand dollars off a tax bill. That is a real savings and it is not nothing. It is also the reason the number at the bottom of the page is smaller than the truth, and that number is the one a buyer multiplies. You have been optimizing the wrong figure for a very long time, and nobody told you, because the person who would have told you does not show up until you are already trying to leave.

The strange thing about building something that runs without you is that it requires you to actively make yourself less necessary, and nobody in this industry was trained for that. We were trained to be the one on the floor, the one the parents ask for, the one who fixes it. Every instinct that made you good at teaching martial arts works against you here, which is probably why so few owners ever get past it. The school that can survive your absence is also the school that stops needing your ego, and most owners discover they are more attached to being needed than they ever were to being free.