Episode 93

Flatlining at Exit: When Your Business Isn’t Sellable

A business can look strong from the inside and still raise red flags when a buyer takes a closer look.

Laurie Barkman joins Maartje van Krieken to talk about what makes a business transferable, valuable, and ready for transition. Laurie is the founder of Business Transition Sherpa, author of The Business Transition Handbook, a certified exit planner, an M&A advisor, and a former $100M CEO who led a company through a successful acquisition by a Fortune 50 company.

Many owners wait until burnout, age, health, partner pressure, or market stress forces the conversation. By then, the business may run well day to day but still be fragile as an asset. What happens when customer relationships live mostly in the owner’s head? What if contracts are informal, leadership depends on one person, or key partners have never talked honestly about the future?

Laurie breaks down the three forms of readiness every owner needs to consider: personal, financial, and business. For leaders who are not ready to sell today, this conversation still matters. The same work that makes a business more attractive to a buyer often makes it easier to run right now through better systems, stronger contracts, less owner dependence, and more clarity around risk, value, and future options.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Understanding Business Sellability vs. Business Success

02:59 Why Business Owners Pursue Exits, Mergers, and Acquisitions

06:04 Personal Readiness and the Emotional Side of Business Transitions

09:14 Financial Readiness: What Is Your Business Really Worth?

15:02 What Makes a Business Attractive to Buyers?

Connect with Laurie Barkman:

Visit Laurie's website

Connect with Laurie on LinkedIn

Successor Assessment

The Business Transition Handbook

Laurie Barkman is a nationally recognized growth strategist, speaker, and CEO who helps engineering, architecture, and design services firm owners scale their companies with clarity and confidence. She is the founder of The Business Transition Sherpa®, author of The Business Transition Handbook, and host of the award-winning Succession Stories podcast.

A Certified Exit Planner, M&A Advisor, and former $100M CEO who led a company through a successful acquisition by a Fortune 50, Laurie brings real-world leadership and transition expertise to every engagement. Today, she empowers AEC industry owners in the built environment to build scalable, self-sustaining businesses that grow without depending on them, creating more time, freedom, and lasting value.

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

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The Business Emergency Room: For Leaders Facing Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity & Ambiguity (VUCA)
Triage, Tools & Tactics to recover from or prevent business chaos in this VUCA business environment

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Maartje van Krieken

Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist, executive consultant, and your at host of The Business Emergency Room podcast, where growing businesses go when things get messy. With a career that began in frontier oil and gas and spanned war zones, boardrooms, and billion-dollar pivots, Maartje has spent over two decades helping organizations steer through chaos and come out stronger.
Now through her consulting firm, The Chaos Games, Maartje works with medium-sized businesses, especially those scaling rapidly or navigating uncertainty, to diagnose breakdowns in leadership, collaboration, and decision-making before they become business emergencies. Her signature approach blends practical triage, people-first strategy, and blunt Dutch honesty to help teams realign fast.

​The Business Emergency Room delivers high-impact insights for business leaders, board members, and investors who are tired of the symptoms, disconnection, friction, paralysis, and want the tools to fix what’s really going wrong. Maartje’s episodes cut through fluff with stories, frameworks, and metaphors that turn even the most complex chaos into something leaders can act on.
Maartje is based in New Orleans and speaks regularly on navigating organizational storms, building business resilience, and turning reactive firefighting into proactive leadership. Whether you’re scaling a business, running a team, or dealing with dysfunction, The Business Emergency Room is the place to find straight talk and smarter tools.