Mark Herbick, Founder & CEO at Pursant, The Science Behind Selling A Business

Every founder running a talent solution gets the same email. A broker, a strategic, a private equity associate, asking whether you would ever consider a conversation. Most founders have no framework for answering, so they either ignore it or take a meeting they were never ready for.

Mark Herbick has sat on both sides of that table. He built and exited a national facility services platform, then founded Pursant in 2010. His firm now works on 40 to 50 transactions a year, most of them between $50M and $150M in enterprise value.

We're building Human Cloud to make the flexible workforce market legible from the buyer side, so companies can find and vet talent solutions in minutes instead of months. Mark does the same work from the ownership side, making a company legible to the people who might buy it.

In this episode, Mark Herbick shares:

• The three tests that answer "is now the right time to sell": is the business sale-ready, is the market buyer or seller favorable, and are you actually ready to get out
• Why a declining sales trend during a sale process kills deals at any size. Buyers will not catch a falling knife. Flat is the worst case you can afford
• The counterintuitive state of today's market: buyers are starved for deal flow, private equity has raised more capital than it can deploy, and genuinely good companies are scarce
• Why uncertainty no longer stops M&A. It just makes due diligence far more rigorous and far slower
• The turkey-in-the-oven problem. Owner readiness gives you no early warning, and by the time the button pops it is too late to build enterprise value

Mark Herbick is the Founder and CEO of Pursant, an M&A advisory firm working on 40 to 50 transactions a year. He completed a dozen of his own transactions as an entrepreneur before founding the firm.

Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.