I have sat across a table from a mother who had no idea her daughter was being sold.

I have been in rooms where the work of rescuing children from trafficking happens – not from a distance, not as a donor writing a check from a safe office, but boots on the ground, in the places nobody wants to look. I have seen what exploitation does to a human being when the systems designed to protect them have either failed or never existed in the first place.

That work changed me in ways I don’t have the words for.

When I sold my companies in 2019 and started turning my attention toward business owners – the ones drowning in businesses that owned them, the ones being misled by advisors who didn’t understand what they were selling, the ones who had built something real and had no idea how to convert it into the life they deserved – I felt something I didn’t expect.

I felt the same pull.

Not the same circumstances, the same stakes, or the same darkness. I want to be precise about that. But the same fundamental conviction: here is a population of people who are being failed by the systems and structures that were supposed to serve them. And somebody needs to stand in the gap.

The Exploitation Nobody Talks About

I know that word is strong. I use it deliberately.

Business owners in this country are the engine of the economy. They employ the people who employ everyone else. They take the risks that create opportunity. They carry the weight of payroll and compliance and competition and market shifts, often alone, often without the sophisticated resources that larger companies take for granted.

When it comes time to exit – when they’ve spent twenty or thirty years building something and finally want to convert that into freedom, into liquidity, into the next chapter – they walk into a room full of people who are largely incentivized to serve themselves first.

Brokers who list businesses at inflated valuations to win the engagement, then quietly drop the price six months later. Advisors who collect fees regardless of outcome. Buyers who use information asymmetry to compress valuations on owners who don’t know what their business is actually worth. A due diligence process designed by and for sophisticated institutional players, and almost entirely unfamiliar to the person being evaluated.

The average business owner goes through one exit in their lifetime. The people sitting across the table from them have done it hundreds of times. That gap in experience and knowledge is not an accident, and it is not neutral. It costs owners real money, real time, and real control over what should be the most significant financial event of their lives.

That is exploitation. It is quieter than other kinds, but it is real.

What a Protector Does

I have never thought of myself as a consultant. I am not wired for that word.

The way I think about what I do – in the anti-trafficking work, in the domestic violence work, and in the work I do with business owners – is as a protector. Someone who stands between a vulnerable person and a system that would take advantage of them if nobody intervened.

The trafficking work taught me what that actually requires. It requires proximity. You cannot protect someone from a distance. You have to get close enough to understand exactly what they’re facing, who has power over them, and what it would take to get them to safety. You have to be willing to go into uncomfortable places and stay there until the work is done.

The business exit work is no different. Not in the emotional register – I’m not comparing the trauma of a trafficking survivor to the frustration of a business owner, and I never would. But in the structural demand it places on anyone who wants to actually help: you have to know this world from the inside. You have to understand the buyer’s playbook well enough to counter it. You have to be willing to stay in the deal, in the details, in the difficult conversations, until your client gets what they deserve.

That’s not something you do for a fee. That’s something you do because you cannot not do it.

Why Business Owners Specifically

When I look at the business owner community, I see people who have given enormous amounts of themselves – their time, their capital, their health, their family hours – to build something that matters. I see a world that consistently undervalues what they’ve built and underserves them at the moment it matters most.

Nobody fights for them. Not really.

Politicians talk about small business but legislate against it. Advisors serve them transactionally. The financial industry treats them as a market segment rather than as individuals with real lives and real stakes.

I’m not interested in treating them that way. I’m interested in what I’ve always been interested in: finding the person in the room who has the least power relative to the system they’re navigating, and making sure they leave with more than they came in with.

That’s what I did before I ever thought about business exits. It’s what I’ll keep doing long after the last deal I ever work on is closed.

The Thread That Connects All of It

People sometimes ask me how I hold all of it together… the business work, the anti-trafficking work, the domestic violence advocacy, the speaking, the family. How does it not fragment?

The honest answer is that it doesn’t fragment because it’s all the same work.

It’s the work of standing up for people who are being underestimated, underserved, or outright exploited by systems with more power than they have. The context changes. The tools change. The specific knowledge required changes dramatically.

But the call is the same. It has always been the same.

I didn’t choose to be this way. I just stopped pretending I was built for anything else.

If you’re a business owner who wants to know exactly what your company is worth – and what’s quietly standing between you and the exit you’ve earned – download the free Exit Code Blueprint at exitcodeblueprint.com. It’s the first honest look at your business through the lens of the people who will eventually sit across the table from you.

You deserve to walk into that room prepared.