Marshall Doyle ran his company for 20 years without a single vacation…

He was stuck at about $3.5 million in revenue and growth was incremental. His hands were in every part of the business, and he told Allison Maslan that, "he had some pride in his hard work.”

But then Allison told him she was going to get him out of the day-to-day.

"He laughed at me," she says. "He seriously laughed at me."

Then he said: “Prove it.”

Within a few years, Marshall went from 60-80 hour weeks to 1 meeting a week. He used the free time to acquire 35 other companies, none of which depended on him to run.

Then he exited "for a very, very high valuation."

Allison told that story at last year's Business Acquisition Virtual Summit. The point for anyone buying or selling a business is the same: "If I find out that the day you leave that your company tanks, then I'm not interested."

Allison is CEO of Pinnacle Global Network, her 10th company. She has been mentoring CEOs since 2010, founded 10 companies and sold 4, wrote Scale or Fail, and says her method has reached more than 150,000 CEOs. Her team of 40-plus mentor CEOs works mostly with companies doing about $1 million to $150 million in revenue.

Here is the 5-phase map she used to explain how an owner like Marshall gets from "hands in everything" to "one meeting a week" — and why that is what made the 35 acquisitions possible:

"Only 17% of businesses are saleable," Allison says. "And out of those 17%, most of them are not getting much money for their business."

Her diagnosis is founder dependence. "If your business depends on you, you don't own a business, you have a job, and it's the worst job in the world because you work for a lunatic, which is you."

Marshall had lived that for two decades. Hands on every lever. Pride in the grind. Stuck at the same revenue band. That is the profile a buyer discounts hard, and the profile a seller cannot exit well from.

Allison's five phases tell you where that stuckness lives, and what has to change.

Phase 1, Startup. Everything depends on you. Not scalable yet. Her cited stat: founders who hire an assistant in the first six months "get to seven figures in half the time."

Phase 2, Pioneer. You have a small team and you are delegating — but you still approve everything going in and out. "You think that you're helping, but you're actually choking the growth of your business," she says. "Which is a very nice way of saying you are the control freak."

That was Marshall's posture: every area of the company still needed him. For a buyer, a phase 2 target means customers, pricing, and approvals still run through the seller. Plan the transition before close, not after.

Allison calls phase 3 the Ringleader "because it's a circus." Teams form, people come and go, and this is where she says many businesses stall for good: "the business dies here and it never gets beyond this."

The biggest mistake, in her words: "You hire people, you bring them on the team before you understand what success looks like for the role. And I mean down to the metrics... in value in dollars to your bottom line."

Marshall's "prove it" moment sat right here. Getting him free meant building the team and the leadership so the company was managed without him — not adding more hours.

Another client, Constance Wannamaker, was working about 17 hours a day at a law firm doing roughly $2.5 million with about 30 employees. Once they started replacing her in the bigger areas of the company, the firm grew in two and a half years to more than 300 employees and $50 million in revenue, and was named the fastest-growing law firm on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list.

Allison says it was set to hit at least $80 million in 2025.

Before your next hire, write down the dollar result that role should produce in year one.

Phase 4 is the Co-creator. You build with the team instead of top-down. Allison's own proof: she lives in Mexico 5 months of the year "while my team's got it handled."

The cash objection gets a formula: "If every person on your team was bringing in 3-10 times what you paid them for their yearly salary to your bottom line, you might be thinking differently." Not hiring, she argues, has its own price — the cost of inaction.

The behavior change is simple and hard. When someone asks what to do, answer with "What would you do in this situation?" or "Come up with three different ideas and pick one." As she puts it: "Stop being the octopus with your hands in everything."

That is the shift Marshall had to make before the calendar opened up.

Phase 5 is the Visionary.

"You could go to Bora Bora for six months and it continues to flourish," Allison says — but only if you track North Star metrics in every department (cost of acquisition, retention, conversion) and have leaders in four areas: sales, marketing, operations, and whatever you sell. Add a strategic second-in-command. Hire one or two of these senior people a year, not all at once. Great leaders, she says, "will hit the ground running within 30 days."

"Your role as the CEO is to focus on the future," she says. "Your team's role is to focus on today."

That is the operating picture behind Marshall's one meeting a week. Once the company no longer needed him in the day-to-day, Allison's punchline is blunt: "He acquired 35 other companies because he had the time to do so. And by the way, none of them depended on him to run."

She does not walk through the deal math on those 35. What she insists on, for anyone acquiring, is culture alongside the numbers: "The number one thing when you're looking at acquisition besides obviously the profitability and the numbers, is the culture... if they've got a lot of toxicity there, that can be the downfall."

Then he exited at a very high valuation — from a company that, 20 years earlier, could not spare him for a vacation.

If you're buying:

If you're building to sell (or to free yourself to acquire):

As Allison put it: "You need to always be working on replacing yourself."

Join Allison year's Business Acquisition Virtual Summit is November 20-21, with Carl Allen, Jeremy Harbour, Adam Coffey, Roland Frasier, and Nick Bradley. Early bird tickets are $97, so tap here to get $60 off and save your seat.

Thanks for reading Acquiring & Exiting

Join Allison again at year's Business Acquisition Virtual Summit (November 20-21), as well as Carl Allen, Jeremy Harbour, Adam Coffey, Roland Frasier, Nick Bradley, host Ross Tomkins, and more. Early bird tickets are $97, so tap here to get $60 off and save your seat.