OUR MISSION

Arming the Independent Exit Planner to Deliver Like a Firm

We're building the platform that gives a solo or boutique exit planning practice the analytical depth of a 10-person M&A advisory team — so planners can stop building spreadsheets and start guiding the most important financial decisions their clients will ever make.

Our Inspiration

After years in M&A advisory and financial due diligence at the institutional level, we kept encountering the same gap: business owners approaching the most significant financial event of their lives — the sale of their company — with almost no preparation, and exit planners working without the analytical tools to help them prepare properly.

The statistics are staggering: over 70% of businesses that go to market fail to sell, not because they lack value, but because they aren't exit-ready. Owners leave millions on the table due to poor timing, suboptimal deal structures, and value gaps that could have been closed years earlier with the right guidance.

The exit planners who serve these owners are skilled advisors — but they're doing institutional-grade analytical work with consumer-grade tools. Building valuations in Excel, transcribing client meetings by hand, and recreating strategy reports from scratch for every engagement. We built ExitEdge to close that gap.

Why We Started This

We founded ExitEdge because we believe the independent business exit planner is one of the most underserved professionals in financial advisory. They guide owners through the largest financial decisions of their lives — and they do it with spreadsheets, manual analysis, and gut instinct built from years of experience.

They shouldn't have to choose between spending three months building a financial model or spending that time with the client developing the strategy. They shouldn't lose a client to a competitor simply because that competitor delivered a more polished presentation.

By combining AI-powered exit candidate prospecting, automated four-phase client assessment, transcript intelligence, and client deliverable generation into one platform, we give independent exit planners the analytical firepower of a full advisory team — so they can focus 100% of their energy on what only they can provide: expert judgment and trusted relationships.

WHAT WE'RE BUILDING

Our Goals

Close the Analysis Gap

We make institutional-grade exit analysis — the kind large M&A advisory firms charge six figures to produce — accessible to every independent exit planner at a price that makes sense for a boutique practice. Level the playing field so expertise and relationships matter more than team size.

Eliminate the "Preparation Tax"

Every exit planner pays a hidden tax in time spent on manual analysis instead of client advisory. Our goal is to make automated, comprehensive four-phase assessment the industry standard — so planners stop acting as analysts and start acting as strategic advisors.

3x the Impact, Zero Extra Headcount

The best exit planners are limited not by expertise but by bandwidth. By automating the analytical and deliverable-generation work, we free them to serve three times the clients with deeper, higher-quality engagements — and command the fees that reflect that value.

THE TEAM

Meet Our Founders

Ziye Lin

CEO & Strategy

Ziye brings over a decade of M&A and financial due diligence experience to ExitEdge. As a former Director in FTI Consulting's Technology, Media, and Telecom practice, he led engagements spanning due diligence analytics, M&A advisory, and post-merger integrations for both strategic buyers and private equity firms.

At FTI, Ziye sat on the institutional side of hundreds of M&A transactions and watched business owners arrive at the closing table underprepared — leaving value on the table that years of proper exit planning could have captured. That gap is what ExitEdge is built to close.

Stevie Rhim

Chief Business Officer

Stevie serves as Chief Business Officer, bringing deep expertise in product strategy and go-to-market execution from the high-tech sector. As a former Director of Product Management and Marketing, he led cross-functional teams to launch multiple full-stack hardware and software solutions from concept to commercial success.

Stevie's strength is translating complex analytical capabilities into tools advisors actually want to use. His mission is to make ExitEdge the indispensable operating system for every independent business exit planner in America.