The chart was projected onto the white wall, glowing like a radioactive beacon. I was leaning back, tapping a pen against my teeth, waiting for the applause. Look at that slope, I thought. We had hit a 128% increase in revenue over the last 8 months. It was the kind of trajectory that usually gets people a cover story or at least a very expensive dinner. But the buyer, a woman named Sarah who had the stillness of a hunting heron, wasn’t looking at the peak. She was looking at the thinness of the line. She asked me, with a voice as flat as a prairie, how many people we had hired to support those 888 new accounts. I told her we were lean. I told her we were efficient. I told her we were ‘crushing it.’ She didn’t look impressed. She looked like she was watching a car drive toward a cliff at 118 miles per hour.

The Wildlife Corridor Analogy

Nora C., a friend of mine who works as a wildlife corridor planner, once explained to me why you can’t just clear a path and call it a success. If you create a corridor that’s too exposed or too narrow, the animals won’t use it, or worse, they’ll be picked off by predators who know exactly where the bottleneck is. She spends 48 hours a week mapping out how deer and cougars move through fragmented landscapes.

That’s what a revenue spike looks like to a sophisticated private equity buyer or a strategic acquirer. It looks like a burst pipe. They aren’t wondering how you did it; they’re wondering when the water is going to run out. They see 128% growth and they think: customer concentration. They think: the founder is doing all the selling and won’t be there in 8 months. They think: they’ve pulled forward three years of demand and now the well is dry.

I’ve spent the last 28 days thinking about that heron-like buyer. She was right to be skeptical. In that particular company, we had $8,818 in monthly recurring revenue coming from a single client who represented 58% of our total book. If that one client decided to sneeze, our entire ‘growth story’ would catch pneumonia and die. We were bragging about the height of the building without mentioning that the foundation was made of wet cardboard. It’s a common mistake, a vanity that we all succumb to because it feels good to see the numbers go up. But buyers don’t buy feelings. They buy systems. They buy the assurance that on Tuesday morning, 48 weeks from now, the business will still be standing even if the current owner is sitting on a beach in Cabo.

When you present a business that is growing too fast, you are essentially asking the buyer to catch a falling knife. They have to figure out how to scale the operations, the customer service, and the tech stack at the same speed you’ve been scaling the sales. Most companies can’t do it. They buckle. The churn rate on those new 888 customers starts to climb because the onboarding process was handled by a stressed-out intern instead of a robust department. The ‘lean’ team I was so proud of was actually just 18 people working 80-hour weeks. That isn’t a business; it’s a hostage situation.

I remember Nora C. describing a corridor she’d mapped near the interstate. She found that the animals were avoiding the widest part of the path. Why? Because there was no cover. It was too easy to be seen. Rapid, unexplained growth is the same way-it’s too ‘loud.’ It attracts the wrong kind of attention and exposes every single weakness in your delivery model. A buyer looks at that and sees a massive bill for infrastructure that you neglected to build. They see a need to hire 28 new people immediately just to keep the lights on. They see risk. And in the world of M&A, risk is the only thing that discounts a price faster than a lawsuit.

Narrative Over Spreadsheet

This is why the narrative matters more than the spreadsheet. You have to be able to explain the ‘why’ behind the numbers. If you’re growing at 48% year-over-year, and you can prove it’s because of a repeatable, automated lead-generation system rather than a one-time fluke or a single massive contract, you’ve just added a zero to your valuation. This is where professional guidance becomes the difference between a deal and a disaster. Working with someone like kmf business advisors allows a founder to stop looking at the ‘what’ and start fixing the ‘how.’ It’s about translating that raw, terrifying growth into a language that sounds like stability to a buyer. You need someone to look at your ‘broken mug’ of a business and help you glue the pieces back together before you put it on the auction block.

I still have that shard on my desk. It’s a reminder that even the things we love can be fragile if we don’t respect their limits. I think about Nora out there in the woods, looking at tracks in the mud, trying to find a way for things to move safely from one place to another. A business sale is just a transition from one ecosystem to another. If the animal-the company-arrives at the border exhausted, starving, and chased by its own shadows, it’s not going to survive the crossing.

We need to stop obsessed with the ‘speed’ of our success and start looking at the ‘width’ of our support systems. If your revenue is growing by 88%, but your internal documentation hasn’t been updated in 8 months, you aren’t winning; you’re just accelerating toward a wall. The buyer isn’t being mean when they ask the hard questions; they’re trying to see if there’s a pilot in the stickpit or if everyone is just screaming in the back.

It’s a hard pill to swallow for those of us who grew up on a diet of ‘hustle culture’ and ‘growth hacking.’ We want the big numbers. We want the 1,248% ROI headlines. But those headlines are often the obituaries of companies that couldn’t handle their own weight. I’ve seen 48 different founders burn out because they were so focused on the top line that they didn’t notice the bottom line was being eaten by inefficiency and churn. They thought they were building a rocket ship, but they were actually just building a very expensive firework. It looks great for four or eight seconds, and then it’s just ash and silence.