why The Founders Exit®
The Founders Exit® exists because of what I didn't know in 2021.
Comma Group came out of my Executive MBA at Warwick. The dissertation was on business models for the sharing economy and lean start-ups; the company was what happened when four of us decided to actually build it.
Comma was a specialist data and information consultancy. We had spotted that data was becoming the thing every enterprise depended on, and that almost nobody was managing it well. We were shortlisted for a string of entrepreneurship awards and highly commended at the National Business Awards.
We set one goal at the outset: an exit within five to seven years.
We expanded into the US organically. I hired someone senior to run it. Eighteen months later they resigned without warning. Their deputy also resigned while I was somewhere over the Atlantic.
What followed was tough. We made redundancies. We bought out a co-founder. For a period in 2019 I genuinely did not know whether Comma would survive the year.
It did. But I learned something in those months that no advisor had ever told me: a business is only worth what it is worth without you in the room, and you find that out at the worst possible moment.
Comma was acquired by Amplifi five years after inception - inside the window we had set ourselves at the start.
The part I still find hard to explain: the relationship that led to the acquisition came out of the US operation. The thing that nearly destroyed the business is the thing that eventually sold it.
On paper it was a good outcome. A founding goal, met on schedule, by a buyer who could take the business further than we could alone.
Two years, completed in September 2023. Year one was harder than the sale. Integration meets resistance in ways no data room anticipates, and you discover quickly which decisions are no longer yours. Year two moved onto different terms and got easier.
But the thing that actually caught me out wasn't commercial. It was the identity vacuum. I had spent five years as the person who ran Comma, and then I wasn't. The money solves problems you assumed were about money. It exposes the ones that never were.
Nobody warns you that the hard part isn't the bank transfer. If I could do one thing differently, I would have built the answer to "who am I without this" before the deal closed, not after.
Everything I learned, I learned in the wrong order - during the process, under time pressure, with a buyer already at the table.
The information a founder needs to prepare properly is not secret. Most of it sits in public sources: your filings, your market, your competitors, the same records any buyer will pull. What didn't exist, until now, was a way for a founder to see it early, in one place, without appointing an adviser and starting a clock.
That is what The Founders Exit® is. Not a broker, not a substitute for the advisors you will eventually need, but the preparation that should happen years before you call them - so that when you do, you are negotiating from strength rather than scrambling through diligence.
So I built the thing I wish someone had handed me in 2019.
TFE® is not FCA-regulated, and that is by design. We are an education and preparation platform, not a regulated advisor and not a broker.
The output is meant to make your conversations with real advisers shorter, better informed and more valuable, not to replace them.
Leigh Wells
Founder, The Founders Exit®