Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

Why Founders Sabotage Their Own Company Exits | Rob Follows

26 Apr 2026 · 0 min

Watch on YouTube

0:20

In this interview segment, Cameron Herold highlights a common founder mistake: continuously raising the desired sale price as an exit approaches, which can sabotage the deal. He and the co‑host (Speaker B) propose a concrete solution—having founders pre‑define and write down a "required" minimum exit amount and a "preferred" higher target. By committing these numbers in advance, founders can resist the temptation to keep moving the bar when bids arrive, making it easier to evaluate offers and lock in a deal.

I want you to speak to something that I've seen a couple of entrepreneurs make huge mistakes when they're chasing a number in their mind to sell for. And then as they get closer and closer to an exit, they move the bar, they change the number. Why do entrepreneurs keep moving the bar and how do you get them to understand that there's a certain point that they should write a number down?
So what we do is we sit down with our clients ahead of time. What are the required outcomes? What are the preferred outcomes? As you mentioned, write them all down. My absolute required is this, like say $100 million, but I prefer to have $300 million or whatever the numbers are. And when the bids start coming in, we pull that out.
Yeah.
And because it might be a year later, 6 months later or whatever, and people forget. And when a bid comes in at $200 million in that scenario, we're like, this is a good bid. We're going to keep fighting it. We're going to keep driving it up. But remember, we wanted $100. We're now at $200. So we're going to go hard. But when it stops, giving us indicative values that are higher in a soft auction, we got to lock down and go. Yeah. And then keep the second couple of guys warm so that we can get through this.