Mastering the Exit Gauntlet book
Mastering the Exit Gauntlet (Coming May 2026)

What Really Happens When You Try to Sell Your Business

Most business books tell you how to build and grow a company. This one tells you how to sell and what happens after you do.

When Christine Slocumb decided to sell her marketing agency after twenty-two years, she thought the hard part was over. She’d done the work. Built something real. Something that mattered.

She was wrong.

What followed was three years of running a gauntlet while still running the business. Five letters of intent. Over fifty buyer pitch meetings. Mountains of due diligence that made root canals look pleasant. And the special torture of deals dying at the finish line, until she finally closed with private equity.

MASTERING THE EXIT GAUNTLET is the tactical playbook for the part of entrepreneurship no one talks about—the actual mechanics of closing your exit and surviving what comes after. Using my PATH™ framework (Prepare, Align, Transition, Honor), I walk you through:

  • The real exit process: From first LOI to wire transfer, including what happens when deals fall apart
  • Due diligence survival: How to protect your business while exposing everything to strangers
  • Deal structure decoded: Why all offers aren’t created equal and how to evaluate what’s actually on the table
  • The emotional aftermath: Identity crisis, relationship changes, and reinventing yourself post-sale
  • Post-close reality: Staying vs. leaving, managing earnouts, navigating team dynamics when you’re no longer the boss, and what to do when you start questioning the whole thing

This is the book I wish I’d had three years into an exit process that almost broke me.

Your business success got you to the exit door. This book gets you through it.

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