ANGELA SPEARS
Vice President | Advisor
Most of the owners I work with show up excited and terrified at the same time. They've built something real, they can see what comes next, and they're about to make a decision they've never made before with more riding on it than anything they've ever done. Both feelings are correct. The excitement means they're ready. The fear means they're paying attention.
My job is to sit on that side of the table with them.
My path here started in accounting. I spent more than twenty years in senior-level corporate accounting, which is where I learned to read a business from the inside out — not just what the financials say, but what they're hiding and what they're understating. That background shapes how I look at every engagement. Before a company goes to market, someone has to understand it honestly, and that's usually where I start.
Not every owner I work with is selling. Some are buying — building through acquisition rather than exiting — and some are years away from any transaction and want to build value in the meantime. The accounting lens applies either way: you can't buy well, or grow well, without understanding what you're actually looking at.
From accounting I moved into financial advisory, where I became a Retirement Income Certified Professional (RICP). After joining Genuine Business Advisors, I earned the Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA) and Certified Merger & Acquisition Advisor (CM&AA) designations. They mean I've been trained in the technical side of exit planning and transaction work, and I take that seriously.
But the reason I do this work is more personal than that.
I grew up inside a family business. When my grandfather sold it, the sale left members of my family unexpectedly out of work, and the proceeds didn't end up protecting anyone the way they should have. Later, I watched someone I love stop working and lose her structure, her purpose, and her sense of who she was. This decline accelerated dementia, and my mother passed at the young age of 66. Nobody had sat with her beforehand and asked what came next.
Those two experiences taught me the same lesson from different directions: the transaction is only half the job. A well-negotiated deal that leaves someone adrift on the other side isn't a success — it just looks like one at closing.
Planning for what comes after
Most exit planning focuses entirely on the business: clean up the financials, strengthen the management team, position for market. All of that is necessary. But it treats the owner as a party to the transaction rather than a person with decades ahead of them.
I built a process to address the other half. It works through the questions that rarely get asked before a closing — what your days actually look like afterward, what you want to be responsible for, what you'd miss, and what's worth getting up for once the business isn't. Some of it is financial. A lot of it isn't.
Owners who've thought this through in advance tend to negotiate better, too. When you know what you're walking toward, you're clearer about what you'll accept, and far less likely to hesitate at the moment of decision. In my experience it's the part that determines whether someone looks back on the sale as the best decision they made or the one they wish they'd handled differently.
How I work
The first thing I try to understand isn't the business — it's you. How you like to make decisions. How much detail you want and when it starts to feel like noise. Whether you're the kind of owner who needs to sleep on things or the kind who wants to move the moment the answer is clear. Who else belongs in the room, and who doesn't yet.
Get that wrong and even a good process feels like it's happening to you instead of with you. Get it right and the whole thing gets easier.
You'll have my number and I'll answer it. The process doesn't change — it's the same disciplined approach on every engagement. How we run it together does.
Contact
Email · O: 617.777.5315 | M: 774.777.0177 · Connect on LinkedIn
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