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This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with 27-year-old Evelin Herrera, founder and CEO of EHVM Apps Capital, an M&A firm working exclusively with mobile app businesses. Founded in 2025, EHVM Apps Capital closes up to 25 mobile app M&A deals a month. Currently, the firm manages about $500 million in active deal value. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.

I worked in apps for five years, doing both marketing and business development, so I got to know different players in the industry by attending conferences and talking with companies nonstop. Also, I never had a home base; I had an Excel sheet of all the companies that I wanted to meet on Earth, about 30,000. I wanted to travel and meet as many as possible. Eventually, that led to meeting very high net worth individuals. One of them asked me if I could get him some companies to buy in the mobile app industry because he didn’t know anyone. That’s how my business started.

M&A: The chance to become a millionaire faster

With M&A, from day one, it was a different connection with founders — because it’s giving them the chance to become millionaires or multi-millionaires. It’s different from raising VC, where maybe you can achieve success 10 years from now. In M&A, you can close the chapter and materialize your success tomorrow or six months from now. M&A for consumer tech wasn’t as well-known. Everyone saw consumer tech more like You can only achieve a big exit if you’re Spotify. But actually, if you’re a small music app, you can also secure a really good exit. 

The business is fully bootstrapped. I had some savings from my previous full-time job, and that was it. We have two full-time employees in addition to freelancers and consultants. 

Through talking about this on social media, I built two funnels. One was for buyers from LinkedIn, so more corporate. And then from X, it was more founder-to-founder. Like, “Hey, I’m building this company. Today I saw this. Today I spoke with this founder. We are doing a founder’s dinner.” So it was community building on X.

Our focus on mobile app companies only is an advantage. We don’t do commerce, SaaS. We don’t try to do it all and accept any client. Just apps. Also, it’s not simple enough to be an app; you must have good metrics and not be a copy of another app.

Managing half a billion dollars in active deal value

EHVM Apps Capital is managing half a billion dollars in active deal value. I’ve unlocked that milestone by focusing on the firm’s service and results — because people talk. Particularly in smaller industries, everyone knows each other. So for us, every time we close one deal, we get five to 10 referrals. Roughly 60% to 70% of our deals are through referrals, and then the rest through inbound. 

Another valuable strategy is meeting people in person. Right now, we’re touring 22 cities in four to five weeks, and I’ll be meeting 50 CEOs many other industry players haven’t met before. An additional secret is, if I’m at a table of five, I want to have at least one or two people who already work with me, either on the buy or sell side, who can advocate for my services. 

Making a case to major players as a young founder

One of the biggest challenges is when we talk with investors in different Fortune 500 companies and public companies and try to convince them that this industry is worth their time and investment. You might get a music app that wants to be sold to Spotify. But Spotify might see it as, “Oh, this is a very small business. Nothing new for me.” 

Also, I’m 27 years old, and my team members are 25, 26, so sometimes people see us and make judgments on age and gender or how we talk, because I don’t speak as formally as a typical corporate leader. 

Educating founders on the mobile app industry

Another challenge is educating founders. Now with social media, so many people post YouTube videos claiming they became millionaires overnight. Maybe, but you also paid 50% of that in taxes. There are so many details people leave out. Also, the App Store takes 30% of your revenue. So right away you have a 30% tax. If you’re just starting, they have some small business programs that take 15%, but as soon as you get big, they charge 30%. 

AI is making the market more competitive too. For an app that has one use case, like you take a picture of your food and get the nutrients, that’s so easy to develop. To create a business 15 years ago, you needed to provide much more value than today. Now, you have influencers selling an ebook that they created with AI for $150. And then you have apps that have one functionality charging $29 per month on subscription.

M&A is a finance business that hinges on relationships

EHVM Apps Capital relies more on automations than AI. For instance, when we get an NDA signed it notifies the team, or when we sign a new agreement it prepares a potential list of buyers, and so on. But AI itself for us, I only see that it decreases value. If I create an AI summary and send it to my team, they don’t read it. They give it to their AI to give them a summary. And then it’s just communication through AIs. I need my team to use their brains. 

M&A is a finance business, but it’s also a relationship business. If I send you an AI document that I didn’t clean up first myself, I’m putting the work on you to go through AI slop. I don’t like to run our process based on AI. I run it based on knowing who’s on the buy side and what they want to see. We also customize material depending on the reader, and so on. 

Why every Fortune 500 company should have a mobile app

Looking ahead, I want every single Fortune 500 company, public company to have their own mobile app business because it makes so much sense. If you’re any business that doesn’t have an app, you’re not interacting with your users daily. An app is the only way of interacting daily because everyone uses their phone for hours every single day. It doesn’t matter if you’re retail, experiences, pretty much anything — it’s the only opportunity that you have to have daily touch points. And that’s so crazy valuable. It’s the only way to become part of people’s lifestyle. 

The industry is only getting bigger, and entrepreneurs interested in breaking into it should talk to people who have been doing this for five years. Then decide if you want to be a seven-figure, eight-figure or nine-figure business, because it’s a totally different path, and there are only a few apps that hit the $1 billion range. Deciding that upfront can help you come up with your vision as a founder. Maybe you want to build a portfolio company and have 10 apps in health and fitness, or maybe you bet on one to become a $200 million company. That’s very important. The execution is completely different depending on your goal: the team, the vision, the audience. 

This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with 27-year-old Evelin Herrera, founder and CEO of EHVM Apps Capital, an M&A firm working exclusively with mobile app businesses. Founded in 2025, EHVM Apps Capital closes up to 25 mobile app M&A deals a month. Currently, the firm manages about $500 million in active deal value. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.

I worked in apps for five years, doing both marketing and business development, so I got to know different players in the industry by attending conferences and talking with companies nonstop. Also, I never had a home base; I had an Excel sheet of all the companies that I wanted to meet on Earth, about 30,000. I wanted to travel and meet as many as possible. Eventually, that led to meeting very high net worth individuals. One of them asked me if I could get him some companies to buy in the mobile app industry because he didn’t know anyone. That’s how my business started.

M&A: The chance to become a millionaire faster

With M&A, from day one, it was a different connection with founders — because it’s giving them the chance to become millionaires or multi-millionaires. It’s different from raising VC, where maybe you can achieve success 10 years from now. In M&A, you can close the chapter and materialize your success tomorrow or six months from now. M&A for consumer tech wasn’t as well-known. Everyone saw consumer tech more like You can only achieve a big exit if you’re Spotify. But actually, if you’re a small music app, you can also secure a really good exit. 

A tenant in a downtown high-rise reports a broken HVAC unit at 6:45 a.m. Before the property manager’s office opens, the tenant has already asked an AI assistant which local vendors handle emergency repairs and messaged one of them. The building’s own contractor never came up. That’s the new customer journey: compressed, automated, often over before anyone on the business side knows it started.

The old model, awareness leading to consideration leading to conversion, assumed people moved through a funnel at human pace. Today, ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and voice assistants collapse that sequence into one exchange.

Businesses aren’t just competing for search rankings anymore. They are competing to be the answer an algorithm decides to give — a shift that’s already reshaping how companies think about visibility.

The shift in discovery: From search engines to AI interfaces

Property managers, contractors and infrastructure firms used to win business by ranking on page one. Now users ask a question and get a synthesized answer with no list of links to scroll through. Fewer clicks reach any single website, even the one whose data trained the response.

Being cited now counts more than being ranked. Organic click-through rates have dropped sharply wherever AI Overviews appear on a search page, meaning visibility without citation is close to invisible.

Understanding how AI systems choose citations is becoming as important for a facilities contractor or a real estate brokerage as domain authority once was for SEO.

Visibility alone is no longer enough

Getting mentioned by an AI system doesn’t guarantee a closed deal. Traffic still doesn’t equal conversion.

• Slow response times or clunky contact forms push prospects toward the next name on the AI-generated list.
• Customers expect answers around the clock, not just during a leasing office’s posted hours.
• Roughly 80% of consumers now rely on AI-generated answers for a large share of their research, and unprepared businesses see significant traffic and revenue erosion.

A property developer can win the citation and still lose the client if intake stalls.

The new bottleneck: Lead response and conversion speed

Once discovery happens, speed decides the outcome. A prospective tenant, a homeowner needing an electrician, or a commercial buyer evaluating a grid-upgrade contractor typically contacts more than one provider at once.

Contacting a prospect within minutes rather than hours dramatically increases the odds of qualifying them, and most companies still respond far too slowly to compete. A missed call during a power outage or a delayed reply to a maintenance request doesn’t just cost one job. It signals that a competitor answers faster, which shapes future recommendations as well.

AI-powered conversion: Turning attention into action

This is where automation earns its keep. AI answering systems, chat interfaces, and voice agents now handle the first touch instantly, day or night, across shift changes that used to leave phones unanswered.

The shift is already visible as businesses move from chatbots to full agentic workflows that qualify and route leads without waiting on staff availability. Legal and professional service firms are among the fastest adopters. Many are turning to AI-powered client intake systems so no inquiry sits unanswered after hours — a lesson that applies just as directly to leasing offices and infrastructure contractors fielding urgent requests.

The AI-powered funnel: Discovery + conversion integrated

Treating discovery and conversion as separate problems is the mistake. The two now function as one system. A prospect asks a question, gets an answer that includes a business, and expects the next step (scheduling, pricing, or a callback) to happen just as fast.

A grid-repair contractor cited by an AI assistant but slow to schedule a site visit loses the job to a rival with a faster intake process, regardless of who ranked higher.

Who wins in this new model?

Some sectors feel this shift first because their customers already expect real-time answers.

Service businesses like legal, healthcare and home services depend on intake speed as much as reputation. At T-Mobile, AI now handles half of customer calls, freeing staff for complex cases.

Ecommerce benefits from AI recommendations paired with instant checkout support, shortening the path from question to purchase.

Local and infrastructure-adjacent businesses, from HVAC repair to power-grid contractors, gain most from voice and AI discovery because customers search in moments of urgency.

What businesses should do now

Founders and developers don’t need to overhaul everything at once, but a few priorities separate businesses gaining ground from the ones losing it.

• Optimize content and data structure for AI systems, not just Google rankings.
• Cut response time with automation, even though some chatbot deployments still frustrate customers when companies prioritize deflection over resolution.
• Align marketing claims with operational capacity, since a promise of 24/7 service only helps if the backend can deliver it.
• Build around user intent rather than keyword lists, especially for urgent, location-specific requests common in real estate and infrastructure services.

The Future: Real-time, AI-driven customer journeys

Predictive engagement is coming next. Systems will anticipate a maintenance request before a tenant files one, based on equipment age or usage patterns, and route it automatically.

Personalized AI responses will replace generic scripts, and fully automated funnels will handle both the question and the transaction, with AI agents managing discovery and conversion as one continuous process rather than two separate departments.

The new competitive advantage

Visibility gets a business noticed. Speed converts the customer who noticed it. Neither works well without the other, and AI is now the connective layer between them, deciding who gets mentioned and how fast that mention turns into action.

For founders and operators managing physical infrastructure where delay carries real cost, the task ahead is straightforward: Treat discovery and response as one pipeline, measured on the same clock. The businesses that own both ends, not just the ones that rank well, will set the pace for the next decade.

A tenant in a downtown high-rise reports a broken HVAC unit at 6:45 a.m. Before the property manager’s office opens, the tenant has already asked an AI assistant which local vendors handle emergency repairs and messaged one of them. The building’s own contractor never came up. That’s the new customer journey: compressed, automated, often over before anyone on the business side knows it started.

The old model, awareness leading to consideration leading to conversion, assumed people moved through a funnel at human pace. Today, ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and voice assistants collapse that sequence into one exchange.

Businesses aren’t just competing for search rankings anymore. They are competing to be the answer an algorithm decides to give — a shift that’s already reshaping how companies think about visibility.

Almost every dealership owner right now is hearing the same warning: get on AI or get left behind. So they move fast. A chatbot on the website. A scheduling assistant in service. Another tool for sales. One for texting. Another for marketing.

On their own, most AI solutions do exactly what they’re supposed to do. The problem is that these tools rarely share context with each other, so they usually don’t know what the others already know. That’s where customer experience starts to break down.

Every new AI tool creates another customer touchpoint.

If those touchpoints don’t work together, customers feel it.

Whether you sell cars or software, the goal isn’t simply to add AI. It’s to create a customer experience that feels connected from beginning to end. Here are five ways to get there.

Shop your own business

Before you think about adding another AI tool, become your own customer. Visit your own website, fill out the form, ask your bot the question a nervous first-time buyer would ask. You’ll quickly discover whether the experience feels seamless or stitched together. Maybe the chatbot asks for information the customer has already entered. Maybe the follow-up email arrives hours later, or the salesperson has no idea which vehicle the customer was looking at.

Individually, these moments seem minor. Together, they shape how customers judge your business.

Shop your own store like a stranger, and do it often, not once. Whatever you sell, spending one hour as your own customer will answer half your AI questions before you spend a dime.

You’ll learn more from one hour as your own customer than from a month of vendor demos.

Build accountability before you build automation

AI should make good decisions, not every decision. That starts with clear ownership and accountability.

Every AI tool should have an owner.

Too often, businesses buy AI, turn it on and expect it to run itself. But AI isn’t a “set it and forget it” technology.

Someone should be responsible for making sure the information it’s using is accurate, that promotions are current, that pricing changes are reflected and that responses still match how the business wants to communicate with customers.

Just as you coach employees, AI needs oversight. It should be reviewed, tested and updated regularly.

That also means checking how it performs over time. Are customers getting the answers they need? Is it escalating conversations appropriately? Is it reflecting changes to inventory, pricing and promotions? Like any member of your team, AI performs better when someone is responsible for it.

Pick one story and stick to it

One of the fastest ways to lose trust is conflicting information.

A promotion on your homepage doesn’t match what’s in a text message. The chatbot quotes something different than your sales team. Service has no idea what happened online.

Every AI tool becomes another voice speaking on behalf of your business. Before adding another one, make sure they’re telling the same story. Customers don’t know which system generated the message. They only know your dealership gave them conflicting information.

Trust is difficult to earn and easy to lose. If customers have to stop and wonder which message is correct, they’ll start questioning the overall experience.

Think beyond the feature you’re buying

It’s easy to evaluate AI one feature at a time.

Will this answer chats?

Will this schedule appointments?

Will this write emails?

Those are important questions. But the more important question is what happens after the tool does its job.

Before buying another AI tool, ask a different question: What happens after this tool does its job? Does the information flow into your CRM? Can sales, service and marketing all see it? Or have you simply created another silo? The feature may work exactly as advertised, but if it can’t share context with the rest of your business, you’ve created another disconnect.

Design for continuity

Nobody wants to introduce themselves twice. Customers shouldn’t have to start over simply because they moved from your website to a text conversation, or from sales to service.

The goal isn’t to give every department its own AI.

The goal is to create one customer experience, even if multiple systems are working behind the scenes.

The best AI is almost invisible. Customers shouldn’t have to think about which tool they’re interacting with or whether they’re talking to a bot or a person. They should simply feel like your business remembers who they are and picks up where the last conversation left off. That’s what great customer experience has always been about.

AI will continue getting better. New tools will keep arriving. But at the end of the day, customers don’t walk away asking for your AI strategy. They leave remembering whether it was easy or difficult to do business with you. That’s the question every AI investment should answer.

Almost every dealership owner right now is hearing the same warning: get on AI or get left behind. So they move fast. A chatbot on the website. A scheduling assistant in service. Another tool for sales. One for texting. Another for marketing.

On their own, most AI solutions do exactly what they’re supposed to do. The problem is that these tools rarely share context with each other, so they usually don’t know what the others already know. That’s where customer experience starts to break down.

Every new AI tool creates another customer touchpoint.

Want to work for yourself? You’re in good company; 62% of U.S. adults would prefer to be their own boss. 

But with no shortage of business ideas, which ones do people gravitate toward? Business lender OnDeck decided to find out. 

Researchers analyzed the number of searches for advice for particular business types to see which are most popular across the U.S. and determine where interest is surging rapidly. 

Across the country, people are searching for advice on starting cleaning, real estate and restaurant businesses most frequently, according to OnDeck’s report. 

However, those aren’t the same businesses seeing the greatest uptick in interest. Starting a Spotify podcast has become the fastest-growing new business idea, the research found. 

And entrepreneurs who host a successful one can generate significant income. A “mid-size” podcast boasting 10,000 to 50,000 monthly listeners might bring in $5,000 to $20,000 a month, while a top 1% podcast surpassing 50,000 monthly listeners can exceed $100,000 in that period, Backstage reported. 

Read on to see the top 10 trending business ideas, per OnDeck’s analysis: 

Want to work for yourself? You’re in good company; 62% of U.S. adults would prefer to be their own boss. 

But with no shortage of business ideas, which ones do people gravitate toward? Business lender OnDeck decided to find out. 

Researchers analyzed the number of searches for advice for particular business types to see which are most popular across the U.S. and determine where interest is surging rapidly. 

Across the country, people are searching for advice on starting cleaning, real estate and restaurant businesses most frequently, according to OnDeck’s report. 

However, those aren’t the same businesses seeing the greatest uptick in interest. Starting a Spotify podcast has become the fastest-growing new business idea, the research found. 

And entrepreneurs who host a successful one can generate significant income. A “mid-size” podcast boasting 10,000 to 50,000 monthly listeners might bring in $5,000 to $20,000 a month, while a top 1% podcast surpassing 50,000 monthly listeners can exceed $100,000 in that period, Backstage reported. 

Read on to see the top 10 trending business ideas, per OnDeck’s analysis: 

According to Silicon Valley Bank’s February 2026 State of the Markets report, U.S. VC fundraising dollars fell almost 20% year over year to their lowest level since 2019. For founders outside the AI boom, the odds are already stacked. Luxury and lifestyle tech founders face an additional layer: a category that’s harder to model, harder to benchmark and, frankly, harder for most investors to intuitively grasp.

When I was raising for InList, a members-only platform for booking curated nightlife and events, I heard a version of the same hesitation in room after room: “This seems great, but we don’t really invest in this space.”

That sentence is where the pitch actually begins. Here’s how to turn skeptical investors into convinced ones:

1. Reframe your market size before they ask

The first thing a consumer-skeptic investor looks at is total addressable market (TAM). If your pitch deck doesn’t answer the market-size question preemptively and credibly, you’ve already lost them. The instinct for many founders in experience-driven verticals is to go broad — “the global events industry is worth $2 trillion” — but that breadth actually signals weakness. Sophisticated investors know you can’t chase it all.

Instead, define a tight, defensible wedge and then show the path to expand it. When pitching InList, we didn’t lead with nightlife. We led with the behavior: high-net-worth individuals who pay a premium to skip friction and guarantee access. That behavior cuts across dining, travel, private events and beyond. The niche entry point was a feature, not a ceiling.

That same thinking also helped us broaden the conversation with investors by shifting the focus from the product to the customer. Our members were affluent consumers who travel frequently, spend on experiences and luxury goods and influence purchasing across categories, from hospitality and private aviation to watches, spirits and other premium brands. When investors understand the value of the customer you’re acquiring, not just the transaction you’re facilitating, they can more easily see the long-term opportunity.

Uber employed a similar approach in its earliest days. Rather than pitching itself as a taxi alternative, it framed the opportunity around a specific behavior: professionals in New York and San Francisco who wanted a black car at the push of a button. That tight wedge gave investors a believable entry point while signaling a much larger platform opportunity beyond it.

2. Speak the investor’s language, not your customer’s

The words that make your members feel special are often the words that make investors nervous. “Curated.” “Exclusive.” “Premium.” These land beautifully in consumer marketing; in a pitch room, they can sound like soft proxies for “small” and “hard to scale.” You have to translate.

When your product relies on high lifetime value and low churn rather than high volume and fast growth, say that explicitly and bring the numbers to prove it. For InList, instead of describing the vibe of the member experience, we anchored every qualitative claim to a data point: average booking value, repeat usage rates, referral-driven acquisition cost. Investors who don’t know the luxury market still know what great unit economics look like.

Rent the Runway navigated this same tension head-on. Jennifer Hyman has said that as a female founder pitching a fashion concept, she had to walk into investor meetings with what she called “15 spreadsheets,” while male founders got by with “a PowerPoint and a dream.” The luxury experience was the hook; the data was what closed the room.

3. Use your waitlist as a proof point

In exclusive consumer platforms, demand signals carry unusual weight if you frame them correctly. A 10,000-person waitlist is nearly meaningless as a raw number. The same waitlist becomes compelling when you can say, “These are verified high-net-worth individuals; they converted from a referral-only funnel, and 40% completed a detailed application to get on it.” Now you’ve turned a vanity metric into evidence of real, qualified demand.

During InList’s raise, the quality of our waitlist mattered more than its size. We could demonstrate that our prospective members matched the profile investors recognized from other luxury verticals: the kind of spender who doesn’t churn over price, who refers organically and who elevates the brand simply by belonging. Scarcity was a deliberate product decision, and we treated it like one.

This approach mirrors what Soho House did in its early expansion. The brand used its waitlists not as marketing theater, but as evidence of concentrated demand in specific cities — a city-by-city proof point that made each new location look like a pre-sold asset rather than a speculative bet.

4. Build the relationships that make the raise inevitable

Traditional venture capital isn’t always the right first call for luxury and lifestyle tech, and waiting for it can cost you momentum you can’t afford to lose. Before raising institutional capital for InList, my co-founder and I structured a creative development partnership to get the product built, which meant we arrived at investor conversations with a working app, real users and proof of concept rather than a deck and a dream.

When we did raise, the $3 million round came through relationships built inside the world InList served. My co-founder and I had deep roots in the Miami nightlife and events scene, exactly the ecosystem our product was designed for. That credibility opened doors that a cold pitch process never would have.

According to a survey published in Harvard Business Review, more than 30% of deals come from a VC’s former colleagues or work acquaintances, with another 20% coming from referrals by other investors. Only 10% result from cold email pitches. In a niche vertical such as luxury or lifestyle tech, that ratio almost certainly skews even further toward relationships. Build your investor network the same way you build your member network: through deliberate access, not broadcast outreach.

Raising capital for a luxury or lifestyle tech company is a different game — not a harder one, once you understand the rules. The investors are out there. They just need the right translator.

According to Silicon Valley Bank’s February 2026 State of the Markets report, U.S. VC fundraising dollars fell almost 20% year over year to their lowest level since 2019. For founders outside the AI boom, the odds are already stacked. Luxury and lifestyle tech founders face an additional layer: a category that’s harder to model, harder to benchmark and, frankly, harder for most investors to intuitively grasp.

When I was raising for InList, a members-only platform for booking curated nightlife and events, I heard a version of the same hesitation in room after room: “This seems great, but we don’t really invest in this space.”

That sentence is where the pitch actually begins. Here’s how to turn skeptical investors into convinced ones:

When something isn’t working on your team, it’s natural to look outward first.

We examine performance, processes, communication and accountability. We ask why people aren’t meeting expectations or why the same problems keep showing up. Sometimes those things are the issue. But over the years, I’ve learned that recurring leadership challenges often have a common denominator: me.

Before I make assumptions about my team, I try to run what I call an emotional pattern audit. These five questions help me identify blind spots before those blind spots become barriers.

1. What problem keeps showing up repeatedly?

One of my favorite tools for self-awareness is the Enneagram because it highlights how you behave when you’re thriving versus when you’re stressed. The greatest strength a leader can have is knowing their own weaknesses.

When I notice the same frustration appearing over and over again, I stop focusing on the individual situation and start looking for the pattern. If the same challenge keeps showing up with different people or under different circumstances, there’s usually something deeper worth examining. Patterns often reveal issues that a single event cannot.

2. What role might I be playing in that pattern?

This is often the hardest question to answer honestly. For years, I thought I had a delegation problem. I couldn’t understand why everything seemed to come back to me. Then I realized I wasn’t struggling with delegation at all. I was struggling with my own understanding of my role.

I explained this recently using family photos. When my children were little, I was always the one holding the camera. I was organizing everyone and managing the moment instead of simply being in it. In business, I was doing the same thing. Instead of focusing on my responsibilities as the owner, I kept stepping into responsibilities that belonged to other people. I was unintentionally preventing ownership.

3. Am I expecting my team to be as invested as I am?

One of the hardest lessons I learned was accepting that my team will never care about the business the way I do. That’s not because they aren’t committed. In fact, they work for me because they’re committed to educating children and care about it deeply. However, that investment has a different lens than that of an owner. They’re simply not going to care about the same things I care about to the same degree that I care as the owner.

For a long time, I found myself frustrated when people didn’t show the same level of passion or urgency that I felt. Eventually, I realized I was expecting people to experience the business through my lens instead of theirs. Once I adjusted that expectation, I became a better leader because I stopped measuring commitment by whether someone thought exactly like me.

Sometimes, the feedback we’re least willing to hear is that we need to adjust our expectations, not our people.

4. Who has permission to tell me when I’m off course?

Every leader needs someone who can see what they can’t. For me, that’s often my husband. I’m a visionary by nature, which means I’m usually thinking years ahead. While that’s one of my greatest strengths, it can also become a blind spot.

Whenever I get too focused on the future, my husband jokes that I’m Icarus flying too close to the sun. What he’s really telling me is that while I’m looking at the horizon, there are things happening right in front of me that need my attention. I have similar people at work, too, people who can prod me back onto the right path.

The best leaders don’t surround themselves with people who always agree with them. They surround themselves with people who are willing to tell them the truth.

5. Am I acting from intention or habit?

Once you’ve identified a pattern, the next question is whether it’s something that can actually change. There are things about me that I can improve. I can communicate more clearly. I can create better systems. I can be more intentional in how I lead. There are also things that are simply part of who I am. I’m always going to be a visionary. I’m always going to care deeply about people.

Growth doesn’t happen when we try to become someone else, but when we learn to refine the habits that hold us back while leaning into the strengths that make us effective.

Turning awareness into action

Identifying a pattern is only the beginning. The next step is deciding whether it’s something you can change and then creating a simple plan to address it. One mistake I see leaders make is trying to fix everything at once. If you discover that you’re avoiding difficult conversations, struggling with delegation or creating confusion through unclear communication, don’t create a ten-step improvement plan. Pick one area and focus on making consistent progress.

I like to identify no more than three action items. For example, if clarity is the issue, I might commit to ending every meeting with clearly defined ownership and next steps. If delegation is the issue, I might choose one responsibility to fully hand off instead of continuing to check in on it. If emotional awareness is the issue, I might ask a trusted colleague to tell me when they notice I’m operating from stress instead of intention.

Just as importantly, check back in with the people affected by the change. Ask whether they’re seeing improvement and whether there’s anything you’re still missing. Leadership growth isn’t about making assumptions. It’s about creating feedback loops that help you improve over time.

The leaders who grow the fastest aren’t the ones who never have blind spots. They’re the ones willing to identify them, work on them, and measure their progress honestly.

When something isn’t working on your team, it’s natural to look outward first.

We examine performance, processes, communication and accountability. We ask why people aren’t meeting expectations or why the same problems keep showing up. Sometimes those things are the issue. But over the years, I’ve learned that recurring leadership challenges often have a common denominator: me.

Before I make assumptions about my team, I try to run what I call an emotional pattern audit. These five questions help me identify blind spots before those blind spots become barriers.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Every owner enjoys seeing a profitable year. It validates years of hard work, reassures stakeholders and creates confidence that the business is moving in the right direction. Yet one of the biggest surprises I see in private markets is how often profitable companies struggle to attract premium valuations.

The assumption is understandable. If profits are growing, surely the business must be worth more. Unfortunately, buyers, lenders and institutional investors rarely see it that way.

Profit explains what happened last year. Value reflects what someone believes can happen after ownership changes. That difference is where many businesses unintentionally leave money on the table.

Profit is an accounting outcome. Value is an underwriting decision.

A company’s income statement may show healthy margins, consistent EBITDA and year-over-year growth. Those numbers matter, but they are only the beginning of the conversation.

Acquirers spend far more time asking a different question: “How confident are we that these earnings will continue after closing?” That single question changes the entire discussion.

A business earning $15 million of EBITDA may receive dramatically different offers depending on how buyers assess the quality of those earnings. The headline number is identical. The perceived risk is not.

Value is ultimately a judgment about future cash flows, not a reward for historical profitability.

Buyers don’t purchase yesterday’s earnings

Owners naturally focus on what they have achieved. Buyers focus on what they are inheriting. That distinction sounds subtle until a transaction begins.

During diligence, profitability is dissected from every angle. Revenue concentration, customer retention, supplier relationships, pricing power, recurring demand, working capital needs, management depth, reporting quality and capital expenditure requirements all become part of the underwriting process.

Suddenly, the conversation shifts away from “How profitable is the company?” toward “How dependable are these profits?”

Those are very different questions.

It’s a little like buying a rental property. The current rent matters, but so does the condition of the building, the quality of the tenants and whether the income is likely to continue after the keys change hands. Businesses are no different.

What creates enterprise value beyond profit?

Several characteristics consistently separate companies that merely report profits from those that command premium valuations.

Cash conversion:

Accounting profits are important, but lenders and investors ultimately finance cash generation.

If EBITDA consistently turns into operating cash flow, confidence increases. If cash is perpetually tied up in receivables, inventory or unexpected capital expenditures, profitability becomes less convincing. Healthy cash conversion demonstrates operational discipline rather than accounting success.

Earnings durability:

One exceptional year rarely defines enterprise value. Institutional buyers want confidence that earnings can withstand changing market conditions.

They examine customer contracts, retention rates, pricing flexibility, backlog, recurring revenue and competitive positioning.

The real asset is not last year’s earnings. It is the likelihood of earning them again.

Management depth:

One uncomfortable truth appears repeatedly in privately held businesses: The more indispensable the owner becomes, the less transferable the business often is.

If every major customer relationship, hiring decision, pricing negotiation and strategic choice depends on one individual, buyers inherit dependency rather than infrastructure.

Ironically, the owner who built the business can unintentionally become its biggest valuation discount.

Financial visibility:

Sophisticated buyers dislike surprises more than imperfect performance. Reliable monthly reporting, realistic forecasting, clear KPIs and disciplined financial controls reduce uncertainty. Uncertainty almost always carries a financial cost.

One investment banker once joked that every missing report eventually finds its way into a lower purchase price. While perhaps an exaggeration, the principle is difficult to argue with.

The hidden cost of looking better than you are

Many businesses spend significant effort making profitability appear stronger. Adjustments are reasonable when they reflect genuine one-time events. But there is a fine line between explaining earnings and stretching them.

Every seller believes the add-backs are perfectly reasonable. Buyers have an impressive ability to become forensic accountants the moment those adjustments appear.

The issue is not whether adjustments exist. The issue is whether they improve credibility or reduce it. Trust is difficult to rebuild once buyers begin questioning the financial story.

A better question for owners

Owners often ask: “How can I increase my valuation?”

I think a better question is: “What would make a sophisticated buyer more confident in the sustainability of my earnings?”

That shift changes management priorities.

Instead of chasing short-term accounting improvements, businesses begin strengthening the characteristics that institutional capital actually rewards.

That may include reducing customer concentration, strengthening reporting systems, building management depth, improving working capital discipline or documenting repeatable operating processes.

These initiatives rarely create overnight profits. They often create something more valuable: confidence.

A practical framework

Before assuming profitability will translate into value, management teams should ask themselves five questions:

1. Would earnings remain stable if the owner stepped away for six months?
2. Does EBITDA consistently convert into operating cash flow?
3. Are customers diversified enough that losing one account would not materially change the business?
4. Can management explain the monthly financial performance without relying on informal knowledge?
5. Would an outside investor understand how the business creates sustainable cash flow within a few weeks of diligence?

If several answers are uncertain, the business may be profitable without yet being fully institutionalized. That distinction matters.

Profitability earns attention. Business quality earns confidence. Confidence earns premium valuations.

The companies that attract the strongest buyers are not always the ones reporting the highest earnings. More often, they are the ones whose earnings appear understandable, repeatable, transferable and capable of surviving well beyond the current ownership team.

Profit tells the story of the past. Value reflects how believable the future looks. For owners considering growth, outside capital or an eventual exit, that difference is more than semantics. It is often measured in the price the market is ultimately willing to pay.

Every owner enjoys seeing a profitable year. It validates years of hard work, reassures stakeholders and creates confidence that the business is moving in the right direction. Yet one of the biggest surprises I see in private markets is how often profitable companies struggle to attract premium valuations.

The assumption is understandable. If profits are growing, surely the business must be worth more. Unfortunately, buyers, lenders and institutional investors rarely see it that way.

Profit explains what happened last year. Value reflects what someone believes can happen after ownership changes. That difference is where many businesses unintentionally leave money on the table.