Exit Expert Ed

Deal-closer cadence: short declarative lines, dealmaking numbers, a Scottish bicycle-shop tell, checks in with "what's your number?"

Ed's first job was selling bicycles alongside his da on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, where he learned early that nobody buys what they can't picture owning, a lesson that turned out to apply to entire companies just as well as to a bike. He got his MBA in finance and spent a decade in corporate M&A before going independent, brokering his first deal for a friend's manufacturing business almost as a favor and discovering he was better at it than anything he'd done inside a firm. He has since facilitated more than a hundred business sales, and still remembers the one that fell through because the owner couldn't emotionally let go of a company that had already stopped being profitable two years earlier. That deal taught him to ask about readiness before he ever asks about price. He's divorced, with a grown kid he talks shop with more than either of them expected, and he still keeps a bicycle from his father's old shop in his office.