After a sluggish 2025 — one in which nearly 60% of announced adhesives and coatings deals were withdrawn over valuation gaps between buyers and sellers — some signs for 2026 are pointing the other way. Private equity is still sitting on record dry powder from 2021-2022 vintages, and family offices are competing directly for lower-middle-market deals.
The sellers who capture the best multiples in 2026 won’t be the ones who time the market. They’ll be those who have spent the last 12 to 18 months doing the unglamorous work of making their business easier to buy. Capital markets won’t rescue an unprepared seller; lack of preparation means more competition for buyer attention and more scrutiny and fallout once you have it.
Your Operational Playbook Drives the Multiple
It’s tempting to think of M&A as something that starts when you hire an investment bank. In practice, the deal terms are substantially shaped long before that — by the health of your commercial engine, the discipline of your operations, and whether a buyer can look at your business and see a stable platform they can build from, rather than a project they’ll spend two years fixing.
We’ve seen this play out directly. In one ChemQuest engagement, targeted operational improvements ahead of a sale process lifted EBITDA 18-42% across areas — contributing to a 20x EBITDA, all-cash outcome, well above the specialty chemicals average and, by our estimates, achieving double the proceeds vs. a less-prepared exit. That’s not a banker’s negotiating skill; that’s the underlying business becoming genuinely worth more.
It tracks with what we’ve seen from an operations point of view as well. Optimization efforts such as rebuilding customer segmentation and pricing discipline to remove or re-price low-value customers to grow EBIT 30%, standing up the commercial and innovation infrastructure behind a nine-figure new product development portfolio, or revamping manufacturing batch workflows and service policies to maximize lifetime customer value to strategic accounts — none of that work was done with a sale in mind. But when it does come time to set a deal in motion, this is exactly the kind of work that determines whether a buyer’s diligence team comes back confident or raises a list of concerns that erodes value at the negotiating table.
Introducing the Sell-Side Readiness Playbook
We’ve mapped the sell-side process into six stages. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be publishing a short series that dives into each one, with the same operator’s lens: What actually moves value at each stage, what commonly goes wrong, and what we’ve seen work firsthand.
Six Stages to a Higher Value Exit
- Pre-Market Value Creation: Fix margin architecture, customer concentration, and management bench strength 12-18 months before you go to market
- Positioning & Narrative: Turn years of operating decisions into one internally consistent story, as well as a buyer list built to match it
- Buyer & Financing Assessment: Vet strategies, PE platforms, family offices, and SBA-backed buyers for strategic fit and certainty of funding
- People & Succession Readiness: Get ahead of key person risk, critical role dependency, turnover, and non-competes before diligence surfaces them
- Commercial & Financial Diligence: Prove growth is structural and repeatable, not a one-time win, when a buyer’s team starts asking hard questions
- Close & Transition: Structure deal terms, retention, and handoff so the business (and its people) thrive after signing
Finding the Right Partner
Whether you’re two years out from a decision or already in a process, we’d welcome a conversation and are happy to offer our initial thoughts and guidance during a scoping call. Our team at ChemQuest works as an extension of yours — helping transform commercial and operations functions ahead of a sale, and parlaying this additional value into a more meaningful transaction.
Our immense specialty chemicals and materials buyer network has been built over decades to include private equity, strategic acquirers, and an increasingly active set of family offices. We are determined to find our clients the absolute right partner, not just the highest bidder.
How can we help you? Let’s start talking: https://chemquest.com/lets-start-talking/
