[hacknat]

While I don't have any advice for an exit. A strategy you could employ to buy yourself more time is to offload all your non-leadership/administrative work onto another employee at the company (possibly hiring someone extra, and moving everyone up a rung on the ladder).

Try to get yourself to a place where you are running the company and aware of what is going on, but doing nothing else than telling people what to do. Maybe you could bring yourself down to 10-20 hours per week? Then you could use the extra time to focus on finding an exit or building the next thing.

[mtrpcic]

While this sounds good on the surface, what do you think his 6 employees are going to do when one founder quits and the other immediately drops to working part time? They're going to leave for better pastures, and OP won't have the opportunity to end things on his terms.

[bitbotbit]

This is a concern. It could result in needing to either do the job of employees who leave myself, or need to train in temp staff. Either efforts could dilute the viability of spending sufficient time on M&A.

[hacknat]

Why do they have to know that he's working part-time? He can still show up to the office, but focus on other things.

[bitbotbit]

Good point. Could work on other things while at the office, but seems difficult to have enough time while down a founder, and trying to run and M&A at the same time.