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Founder Exit Storytelling

Twenty years to build it. Six weeks to explain it.

Founder Exit Storytelling™ works alongside M&A firms and business owners to uncover what makes a founder-owned business compelling, sustainable, and worth wanting — before those reasons get lost in the process.

Buyers understand the business.
We help them understand why it’s worth owning.

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What are your buyers not hearing?

The Buyer Conviction Gap

A good CIM can explain what a company does and where it’s going. Financials can demonstrate how it performs. And a buyer can understand all of it and still walk away thinking:

“Good company. I’m just not sure I need to own it.”

That’s the Buyer Conviction Gap: the difference between just understanding a business and wanting it badly enough to compete for it. It can show up later as softer buyer enthusiasm, less competitive tension, and harder conversations around valuation.

Founder Exit Storytelling™ was built to close that gap.

See it in practice

Real, anonymized case

A client described his business as project-based hydraulic contracting. The financials said otherwise: most revenue came from industrial-grade pipe sales — repeat, predictable, and nothing like the lumpy project work he led with. We repositioned it as a distribution business with a contracting arm, which moved it into a different comp set and put it in front of buyers who would never have looked at a contractor.

What one seller said

“You know, my approach from the beginning is, this business is so unique, you’re not going to find anybody that’s the slightest bit interested in it. And yet, I think in the end, I probably saw eight or nine bids, and I don’t know how many people showed an interest initially, but it was quite a few.”

Every single buyer, he said, mentioned the video first. It gave the CIM something more: the founder himself — his humanity, his passion, and the opportunity to hear him describe the business he had built. Buyers called it “sterling” and “captivating.”

“No one could have done a better job of marketing my company than this team has done for me, and I am entirely grateful to them.”

The four-step process

Move buyers from informed to convinced

1. Discover Request the usual information, then probe further.

We interview business owners to uncover information they didn’t even know was important to unearth buyer-relevant insight.

2. Distill Select the things that matter.

A founder may give us hours of information. Buyers don’t have hours. We identify the handful of ideas that explain why this company is meaningfully different from every other opportunity buyers are evaluating — then reduce them to a clear, memorable buyer case.

3. Defend Make sure the story survives scrutiny.

A claim without evidence is fluff. A fact without meaning is just filler. We dig for evidence supporting the claim and connect it to financial and other operational information. This is where compelling becomes defensible.

4. Deploy Put the insight wherever buyers encounter the business.

We’re not suggesting you change your process. We’re giving your deal team stronger material to put through it — teasers, CIMs, founder and company videos, management meeting prep. The format changes. The objective doesn’t:

We’ve been inside the process

After listening to hundreds of founders explain their companies, patterns are difficult to miss. Buyers rarely struggle to understand what a company does. The harder question is “why this one?”.

390+

Founder, executive & company-profile videos produced over nine years (Mitch)

307

Companies taken to market for over six years leading pre-market prep (Priscilla)

146

Deals closed with our support

Priscilla Schmieder

Priscilla Schmieder

Priscilla pressure-tests the case: the facts, the evidence, the financial and strategic logic behind the claims — the things that need to hold up when initial enthusiasm gives way to scrutiny and diligence. We don’t separate story from substance. We build the story from the substance — compelling enough to get attention, defensible enough to withstand close examination.

Two
disciplines.
One
buyer case.

It has to
create conviction
and survive scrutiny.

Mitch Wein

Mitch Wein

Mitch uncovers what makes the company distinctive, memorable, and worth wanting: the positioning, the differentiation, the founder insight, the human and competitive truths that buyers can connect with — and that make them see the business differently.

Another reason M&A firms bring us in

We can help differentiate your firm before you’ve even won the engagement.

Every founder considering a sale hears some version of the same promises: we’ll find the right buyers, we’ll run a competitive process, we’ll maximize value. All important. All expected.

Now imagine telling a founder something different that you will actually deliver: “Before we take your company to market, we’re going to uncover what makes the business you’ve spent decades building genuinely worth owning — and make sure buyers understand it.”

That’s not another claim about process. It’s something the founder will experience — proof you won’t reduce their life’s work to an EBITDA multiple.

Not another book writer.
Not a video company.
Not an M&A advisor.

We specialize in drawing out what a founder knows and turning it into buyer-relevant insight your deal team can act on. Traditional sell-side materials are very good at communicating information. We help give that information meaning.

Worth owning.

There may be things your client knows about the business that aren’t yet showing up in the way buyers see it. Let’s find them before the market does — or doesn’t.

Let’s find 15 minutes.

We’ll show you what’s missing and what buyers need to hear.

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Career narrative

I build the investment case buyers can defend in the boardroom

What Managing Directors call me for

Most sell-side problems don’t start with the CIM. They start earlier—a founder who can’t articulate what makes the business defensible, financials that don’t yet support the growth story being told, or a thesis that sounds right until a buyer asks the one question nobody prepared for. My work starts before the materials do: uncovering value drivers and issues fast enough to build the thesis around what’s true, not around what feels good to say.

Every seller believes their company is unique. The bar, however, is defensible uniqueness. Differentiation must be scalable, durable, and hard to replicate. My work is finding which parts of a founder’s story clear that bar, then building the thesis, the model, and the materials around it so nothing falls apart under scrutiny.

Selected career moments

  • Led the pre-market team at Woodbridge—later Mariner Investment Banking—for six years. During this time, my team prepared CIMs and teasers for 307 companies, supporting 146 closed transactions.
  • Evaluated deals from the buyer’s side, helping family offices and corporate investors decide which opportunities to pursue and how to price them. I know which questions kill a thesis in committee because I used to be the one asking them.
  • Performed business valuations at Deloitte Corporate Finance.
  • Delivered strategy engagements across the Americas as a contract consultant for A.T. Kearney and Oliver Wyman.

What changes when I’m involved

When I’m involved early, fewer material weak points are found in diligence—I already identified most of them and built the story with mitigating information.

Career narrative

I help organizations uncover what makes them impossible to ignore

Every organization has facts. The memorable ones have a story. I find the one buried under the facts — the story they already have, but can’t quite see — and hand it back in a way that everyone remembers. It doesn’t matter if you’re a 200-person nonprofit or a Fortune 500 brand. The fix looks the same.

People can’t value what they don’t understand

Technology changes. Platforms change. Human nature doesn’t. People still choose organizations they trust. They will remember stories that make them believe. My career has taken me from Madison Avenue agencies and Fortune 500 brands to higher education, nonprofit organizations, and one of the world’s most successful investment banks.

Selected career moments

  • Helped market hundreds of founder-owned companies, contributing to more than $2 billion in completed liquidity events in five years.
  • Co-founded Vogt/Wein, helping build it into a $25 million agency post-acquisition by Interpublic Group.
  • Created Samsung’s global TV campaign that was curated into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
  • Created and spearheaded effective and influential marketing and advertising for brands like American Express, Citibank, ESPN, Samsung, Oxford Health Plans, Volkswagen, and Diet Coke. From hard-working retail and modern banking offers to big brand moments, activations, and experiences.
  • Created SolesUnited, a charitable initiative that distributed more than two million pairs of shoes worldwide.

What people remember

For decades, I’ve been asking better questions, listening very carefully, and uncovering what others overlook. I lead multi-disciplinary teams across strategy, writing, design, digital, production, social media, and film — turning insight into work that people remember and organizations value.