What Manhattanville Lacrosse Taught Me About Selling A Company

Some of the best preparation advice I ever got was on the field at Manhattanville my junior year, from a coach who never sold a company in his life.

We were heading into a stretch where we knew three of the next four games would decide whether we kept the season alive. I remember sitting in the locker room before practice that Monday and asking him, more or less, what we should focus on. He looked at the schedule for a second and said something I have used in M&A advisory work for twenty years.

"Pick the game. Then prepare for that game. Not for the season. Not for the four games. For the one in front of you. The other three look like the one in front of you only on the schedule."

That is the whole thing.

I have spent the last fifteen years working with founders preparing to sell their companies. The job, when you boil it down, is the same one we had that Monday. You can prepare for "selling the company," generically, or you can prepare for the specific transaction in front of you, with the specific buyer in front of you. Those two things look like each other on the schedule. They do not look like each other in the work.

I published a working paper on this earlier in the spring, The Preparation Gap in Early 2026 (SSRN, DOI 10.2139/ssrn.6515478). The central observation in the paper is that the gap between what a founder thought their business was worth at LOI and what it actually closed at is structurally predictable from preparation choices that get made months before any buyer is in the room. The gap is not random. It is the cost of preparing for the wrong game.

The founders I see who keep the percent tend to do what that coach said. They pick the buyer archetype they are preparing for early. They build the case for that archetype specifically. They do not try to be all things to all buyers. They figure out which buyer their business is uniquely valuable to, and they prepare for that one.

The founders who lose the percent tend to do what I did when I first started out, which is prepare for the schedule. Get the financials in order. Tidy up the contracts. Make sure the org chart looks good. Hope someone shows up with a number. The work is real, but it is general. It is the work you do when you have not yet picked the game.

The reason this matters for the alumni community is that a lot of you are in or near this decision. Some of you own businesses. Some of you sit on boards or run advisory practices. Some of you are five to ten years out from a decision that is going to define what the second half of your professional life looks like. The question is not whether you are going to prepare. The question is whether you are going to prepare generically or pointedly.

Three things from the working paper that translate cleanly into the alumni-community context.

First, time. The preparation window that meaningfully changes the outcome is eight to twelve months at the minimum. Two years is more realistic. Less than six months is a problem. If you are inside the six-month window, the work moves from "preparation" to "scramble," and scramble work does not produce the same outcomes.

Second, focus. The most consequential decision in the preparation window is not "which advisor do I hire." It is "which buyer archetype am I preparing for." That decision changes every downstream choice. Get it right and the preparation work compounds. Get it wrong and the preparation work is general at best.

Third, who is watching the gap. The CPA optimizes for tax. The banker optimizes for the transaction. The lawyer optimizes for the contract. None of them are looking at the gap between them. The gap is where the Preparation Gap lives. Someone needs to be holding that view.

That coach is retired now. He still calls me twice a year. I told him a couple of seasons ago that I had been using his locker-room speech in a working paper, and he laughed and asked if I was going to cite him. I said the citation was implied.

The alumni community has, in my fifteen years on the captain's chair, produced some of the most thoughtful founders, executives, and advisors I have ever met. The work that wins the games we are playing now is the same work that won the games we played then. Pick the game. Prepare for it. The schedule will sort itself.