CEOCI Learning Workshop: From Broken Books to a 4.7x Exit: What Investor Readiness Requires

Roughly half of executive hires fail within 18 months — but for many companies, the harder test comes earlier: can your numbers survive scrutiny from an investor, a board member, or a due-diligence team? Financial statements that can’t be trusted, a business-model transition that could break you on cash flow alone, repeated changes in leadership at the top — any one of these can derail a raise, an acquisition, or an exit. The company that handles them well doesn’t do it by accident.

Our upcoming CEOCI Learning Workshop, From Broken Books to a 4.7x Exit: What Investor Readiness Requires, is designed for CEOs who want their business ready for that test before it’s forced on them.

In this 45-minute event, Strategic Partner expert Bart Davis, CEO & Co-Founder of 512Financial, will walk through a real client story — a company that faced untrustworthy financials, a high-stakes business-model shift, and five changes in leadership at the top, and still closed an exit at a 4.7x return. Along the way, he’ll show what had to be true at each stage, and where that same test is showing up again today in the form of AI-built financials.

The Learning Workshop covers:

• The real cost of a company’s numbers not holding up — and what a healthy finance function should actually cost as a percentage of revenue
• The financial metrics that matter most through a major business-model transition (Rule of 40, retention rate, LTV:CAC) and how to defend them to investors
• How to keep a business steady through repeated changes in leadership, and what it costs when the wrong people are in critical seats
• Where AI can responsibly take on financial work, and where a person with real context still has to own the outcome
• A practical investor readiness assessment CEOs can use to score their own business immediately

This aligns directly with the “Make BIG Happen” philosophy — a growth plan stalls, or gets discounted, the moment a company can’t defend its numbers or survive a change at the top. This session treats investor readiness as the foundation under every Make BIG Happen plan: build it early, and the outcome is bigger instead of smaller and rushed.