“I Wish I’d Done This First” – Why CLARITY Reports Are the Missing Link in Exit Planning
In a recent candid exchange with a newly-certified exit planner, he looked me in the eye and said, “I wish I had learned about the Growth-Drive...
3 min read
George Sandmann, Founder
:
Apr 30, 2025 12:52:46 PM
In a recent candid exchange with a newly-certified exit planner, he looked me in the eye and said, “I wish I had learned about the Growth-Drive system first.”
Let that sink in.
This wasn’t a knock on his certification. Quite the opposite—he is rightfully proud of the credentials he’s earned. But what he recognized was profound: while exit planning teaches how to plan, Growth-Drive equips you to do. It’s the difference between drawing a map and building the road. He's now deep into the C3D certification and thrilled.
Your CLARITY ‘Equity Value Planner’ and ‘Protect Value’ tools don’t just help owners prepare for an eventual transaction. There's a reason my good friend and C3D candidate Mike Garrison is so amped: They help you educate COIs and CEOs—with data and a disciplined structure—how to lead with intent, understand Strategic Capacity, and drive up the only metric that matters: transferable equity value.
These reports are action-based education. They are built to translate theory into execution:
These are not reports for reports’ sake. They are client learning experiences that drive action.
In my article “Exit Planning Is Equity Planning”, I break down why traditional exit frameworks miss the mark for 83% of the market. Most businesses are not ready to exit. And guess what? They don’t want to talk about exit yet either. If you’re expanding your reach and relevance with CEOs and business owners…
Here’s the reality:
If you’re leading with exit planning, you’re only speaking to a fraction of your total addressable market. Growth-Drive helps you serve them all.
Business growth isn’t linear. It happens in three dimensions:
The CLARITY Reports—especially when used early—help advisors like you and business owners diagnose where they are in these dimensions and identify the levers they need to pull.
When used as a tool for education, the CLARITY Report changes the conversation entirely. Exit planners become growth advisors. Wealth advisors become more relevant upstream. And business owners see a clear path from status quo to achieving their wealth and legacy goals.
The best exit planners—and the best growth advisors—know that strategy without execution is empty. This is why your colleagues are using Growth-Drive not as an alternative to exit planning, but as its foundation.
If you're a CPA, CFP, CExP, CEPA asking yourself “What might I be missing?”—this is it.
This is why the smart ones realize: “I wish I’d done this first.”
Want to see how the CLARITY Reports create client breakthroughs? Ask for a demo. You’ll never look at exit planning the same way again.
We are attending a targeted series of conferences this year - I'm at the Lido conference in LA now. While the EPI conference is excellent, as a community we're choosing to pass—not because of the content, but because the audience isn’t aligned with our ideal member profile. We have a number of members headed to Florida, and we'll participate vicariously through them. Want to meet with one of them and learn more? Shoot me a private note.
We’re intentionally investing our time and resources into growing our membership among Advisory 2s, 3s, and 4s: the client educators, architects, and general contractors who drive real value. We’re also laser-focused on collaborating with the right exit-planning wealth advisors—key players in the transferable value ecosystem.
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