Advisory · Mission-Protected Exits
You built it. The sale should not undo it.
Many Montessori schools are owner-operated, which means that when they change hands the mission is not automatically part of what transfers. Buyers promise continuity and deliver something else, and the families and staff inside the school usually find out afterward. A founder who spent decades building a school deserves an exit that protects what was built. So do the people still inside it.
Start a confidential conversation →Who This Is For
Founders and owners of Montessori schools who are preparing to sell, transfer, or step away from a school they own. Some are years out and want to prepare properly. Some have an offer in hand and a decision to make. Some have simply realized that the school cannot depend on them forever and want to be deliberate about what comes next.
This work is confidential from the first conversation. Nothing is disclosed to staff, families, or the field on our side, at any point, without your explicit direction.
What the Work Covers
Five pieces, and the order matters.
Preparing the school, and its story, for transition
A school that has never been looked at from the outside is rarely ready to be handed over. This is the work of making the organization legible: what actually holds it together, what depends on you personally, what a successor would inherit on their first Monday, and how the school’s story is told to the people who will carry it.
Vetting successors for philosophical alignment
Buyers and successors say they will keep the mission. Some mean it, some mean it and cannot execute it, and some are saying what they know you want to hear. We apply the same alignment lens used in our Strategic Search practice to the people who would take the school on, and tell you plainly what we see.
Mission-protection provisions in the transfer
Intentions do not survive a change of ownership. Commitments written into the transfer documents sometimes do. We help you identify what must be protected and articulate it clearly enough for your attorney to draft, working alongside your counsel. We do not provide legal advice and do not replace your attorney.
The staff and family communication plan
Most of the harm in a school sale happens in the gap between the decision and the announcement, or in an announcement made badly. Who is told, in what order, with what said and what honestly withheld, on what timeline. This is planned before anything is signed, not improvised after.
Support for you through it
Selling a school you founded is a financial transaction, an organizational process, and a personal reckoning at the same time, and the third one is the part nobody staffs. You spent years being the person everyone else brought their hard things to. This is the part of the work where someone holds it with you.
Being Clear About What This Is Not
We are not brokers. We do not list schools, we do not represent buyers, and we are not paid on the transaction. That matters, because it means our advice about a prospective buyer is not shaped by whether the deal closes.
We do not provide legal advice, and we do not replace your attorney or your accountant. Formal business valuation is arranged through a referred partner rather than performed here, so the number comes from someone qualified to produce it.
What we own is everything else: the readiness work, the alignment judgment about who should be trusted with the school, the language that protects the mission, the communication plan, and the transition itself.
If This Is Not Quite It
Related work, depending on where you are.
Leadership Transition →
A head is leaving, but ownership is not changing.
Founder Transition Toolkit →
Do the preparation yourself, at your own pace.
Strategic Search →
You need to find who comes next.
Not sure where your school is? See the whole path →
Start before you have decided.
The best version of this work begins well before there is an offer on the table, when there is still time to prepare the school and to think clearly about what you want to protect. Pricing is set by consultation, because no two of these are the same shape.
Start a confidential conversation