The global business consulting market was valued at over $330 billion in 2023 and continues to grow. Thousands of firms operate within it, offering strategy decks, growth frameworks, and exit roadmaps to business owners at every stage of development. And yet, according to exit planning data, 80% of business owners still exit their companies not by choice but by force, leaving significant value unrealized in the process. The industry is large. The problem it is supposed to solve remains largely unsolved.
The gap between those two facts is not accidental. It reflects a structural flaw in how most consulting engagements are designed, one that Joshua Kirshbaum identified across 15 years of working in environments where systems either held together without their architects or collapsed entirely, and by co-founding the business and exit consulting company building Impact Ventures International (IVI).
The Consulting Model That Keeps Failing Owners
Traditional consulting firms operate on a delivery model. A client presents a problem, the firm produces an analysis and a set of recommendations, and the engagement ends. The client receives a document. What they do with it depends entirely on their own capacity to implement, which is frequently the same capacity that created the problem in the first place.
For business owners preparing for a transition or seeking to reduce their operational dependency, that model has a specific failure point. The recommendations are only as useful as the owner’s ability to execute them under the existing workload, and most owners seeking outside help are already stretched. Handing an overextended founder a 40-page strategy document and a timeline does not fundamentally change how their business operates.
Exit planning suffers from a related problem. Most advisors enter the picture when an owner has already decided to sell, at which point the window for meaningful value optimization has largely closed. The financial structures, operational systems, and ownership documentation that command premium valuations in a sale take years to build properly. Arriving 90 days before a transaction and attempting to address them produces marginal results at best.
“Most owners start thinking about their exit when they’re already exhausted or already forced into it,” Kirshbaum argues. “By that point, options are limited; they’ve left most of the value on the table.“
What a Different Model Looks Like
IVI was built around the premise that advice without implementation is a handoff. The firm works directly alongside clients through the full process of restructuring, automating, and financially positioning their businesses, coordinating with their existing accountants, lawyers, and advisors to ensure that every element of the financial ecosystem moves in alignment.
The practical difference shows up in how IVI’s programs are structured. VentureMax360 does not produce a scaling report. It rebuilds a business’s operational infrastructure from the inside, using AI-driven analytics to identify inefficiencies and hands-on consulting to implement the changes needed to remove them. The goal is a company that performs at the same level whether or not the founder is present on any given day.
“If your business doubled in size overnight, would it thrive or break under the pressure?” Kirshbaum has asked clients. “Most businesses aren’t built to scale. They rely too much on the owner.“
The IVI’s Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA) program addresses the exit planning gap by starting the process years before any transaction is on the table. Business valuation, risk mitigation, ownership documentation, and personal financial integration are treated as ongoing work rather than pre-sale preparation. By the time a client is ready to transition, the business is already structured to command its full market value. This makes the exit phase smooth and strategic.
The Structural Argument for Earlier Intervention
The five Ds, death, divorce, disability, distress, and disagreement, are the circumstances that exit planning research identifies as the primary drivers of forced business sales. They are not rare events. They are the most common reasons businesses change hands, and they share one characteristic: they arrive without the owner’s permission or preparation.
A business that has been structured for resilience, with documented systems, automated operations, diversified leadership, and a clear ownership transition plan, responds to those circumstances very differently from one that has not. The owner still faces the same personal disruption. The business does not have to share it. That distinction is worth millions in a sale and could be the difference between a viable, ongoing enterprise and a distressed liquidation.
Kirshbaum’s career across the United Nations, nonprofit leadership, and private-sector consulting yielded a consistent lesson across all three contexts. Organizations that survived unexpected leadership changes were those that had been deliberately designed to do so, not those that had simply been well-managed up to that point. IVI applies that lesson to privately held businesses at scale, working with owners across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Latin America to close the gap between what their companies are worth and what they will actually receive when the time comes to step away.
