FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Straightforward answers on how The Founders Exit® works, from readiness scoring and market intelligence to your AI Advisor and exit report.
An AI-native platform for UK founder-led businesses (£1M–£10M revenue) to get exit-ready. It combines verified market, financial and brand intelligence, a structured readiness assessment, exit options, exit goals and due diligence analysis - all pulled together by an AI Advisor.
TFE® doesn't sell your business - it prepares it. Brokers step in once you're ready to go to market; TFE gets you ready beforehand, so when you do bring in an advisor, you're negotiating from strength rather than scrambling through due diligence.
Request access, and most requests are reviewed within 24 hours. Once approved, you build your company profile - most founders do this in minutes - and your readiness score and market position generate from there.
Education is free - you can see your readiness score and market position with no payment required. Preparation, the stage most founders use, is £245 per month billed annually, or £295 per month billed monthly (saving £600 a year if you pay annually). Execution is coming soon.
No. The Education stage is self-serve - you provide your company details, and the platform pulls the rest from public sources. An advisor becomes useful once you move towards an actual transaction, not before.
Yes, anytime, with no exit fees or lock-in penalties. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period.
Yes. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, access is restricted on a need-to-know basis, and the platform undergoes regular security reviews of its infrastructure - the same baseline a buyer's due diligence would expect to see.
Only you and, if you choose to share them, your own professional advisors. TFE® doesn't sell your data, and it isn't shared with any third party beyond the processors needed to run the platform (e.g. hosting, payments, AI processing) - all contractually bound to the same data protection standards.
No - TFE® is an educational and exit preparation platform, not a regulated financial advisor. Its outputs (readiness scores, indicative valuations, exit route analysis) are designed to prepare you for professional advisory conversations, not replace them.
Five areas most founders overestimate by 30–40%: strategy, financials, operations, team, and risk. It's an honest baseline, built around the same questions buyers ask in due diligence — answered on your terms first, not under pressure.
Verified public sources, not self-reported positioning. You get Ideal Customer Profile segmentation, a competitive comparison scored the way buyers actually weigh it, and a view of where competitive pressure bites hardest — so you can defend the right ground before going to market.
Your accounts, ratios, and ownership structure, pulled directly from Companies House — data buyers trust more than a founder's own spreadsheet. It flags filing gaps, thin margins, or ownership anomalies early, and benchmarks your ratios against sector norms.
Yes, through our partnership with The Brand Exit. Strong, well-documented brands can command a 20–40% valuation premium — buyers see loyal-customer brands as lower risk, and this holds for B2B businesses as much as consumer ones.
Exit Options sets out the trade-offs between routes — strategic acquisition, PE, IPO, MBO — since each optimises for something different: speed, price, legacy, or control. Exit Goals then lets you set a target valuation and date, showing the gap to close and the levers that close it.
A conversational advisor built into the platform, grounded in your live scores, market intelligence, and financials — so its answers reference your actual numbers, not generic advice. Ask it things like “why is my financials score low?” and it draws directly from your context.
A customisable, board-ready report combining whichever modules you choose — market analysis, readiness scores, exit options, valuation and journey planning, and risk — each with an adjustable detail level, from executive summary to full detail.
Quarterly. Readiness, market position, and the valuation gap all shift as you execute — re-running the assessment tracks genuine progress rather than guesswork.