You need a vision that goes beyond success
Many people starting a company plan only part of the way. They plan to take them to profitability and not to sustainable profitability; or perhaps they plan to a level of success sufficient to allow them to sell the company, whether as a floatation or a trade sale. In any case they plan to create something that looks good but that cannot survive on its own.
A common failing is to go into business with the idea of ‘making a million’, or thee days a billion,and no real vision beyond that. If you go in with a plan based solely on your exit strategy you will build your business on a different set of assumptions to those you would use when trying to build something to last. This leads to an underlying lack of stability which is fine of you successfully unload your company on someone else and they manage to fix the problems. d o not manage they may be in a position to sue you for concealing relevant information. In practice this is unlikely because one of two things will probably happen first:
The company will hit a circumstance where the missing safety margin matters and will not survive.
The company will reach your exit point but then the due diligence of people involved in the exit will uncover the problems and the exit will not happen.
All this is avoided by assuming you will continue to be in charge after success is achieved. This leads to taking decisions in a way that will make your life easier in the long term. Know how you expect the company to operate in the long term and steer accordingly. Anyone examining the company will see that you are stable and you will find it easier to get finance, to deal with large companies that need stable partners, in short, to operate as a good risk. This allows the success you are looking for to be achieved much more easily. If you were a huge corporate would you want to deal with a company that might not be there in five years time? Many small companies will follow the lead of larger companies, so if you are not able to talk comfortably about the longer term then you may find it hard to survive in the short term. Understand where you are going and how you hope to get there. Over time your vision will change to match the environment but that does not remove the requirement to have a long term vision as well as short and medium term plans.