About Fact Finding

Fact finding is the foundation of ELLA. It’s where advisors collect and organize everything they need to understand a client’s business, financials, and personal goals.

Connecting Fact Finding to the exit planning process

Every exit starts with discovery. Fact finding captures the details that shape how you advise—financials, operations, goals, ownership, and everything in between.

Our approach to Fact Finding is a great example of how we approach malleability as a core experience principle.Rather than confining you to a single intake process, ELLA adapts to how you work. Whether you prefer structured questionnaires, conversational notes, or collaborative document uploads, Fact Finding brings any mix of those elements together in one shared view.

ELLA makes the fact finding process consistent, shareable, and easy to revisit:

• Fact Finding is malleable by design: Use your own structure or start from a template. Every advisor’s discovery process is different, so we strive to give you the tools to work the way you want.
• Fact Finding is collaborative: Invite clients or collaborators to answer questions directly. You stay in control of what they see and where they contribute.
• Fact Finding is connected: The data you capture here powers the rest of ELLA. Sensemaking uses it to surface insights, while Deliverables use it to embed data directly into your reports.

Business Factors

Business factors are the core categories of information you will collect in Fact Finding. For example, business financials, exit goals, operations, and details about a buy/sell agreement. You can think of each business factor as a grouping of questions, that together, will serve as a lever that influences the value of the business when a valuation is conducted.

Each business factor has three types of information that can be added to it:

1. Questions: Questions that can be answered to provide information about a business factor. Questions can be assigned to other users to answer and can be one of several types, including text, number, currency, multi-select, document upload, and more.
2. Notes: Free-form text that you can use to add additional context to a business factor.
3. Files: Documents that can be uploaded to a business factor. Files attached to questions are also shown in the documents section of a business factor.

Using Fact Finding

1. Create or select a client: Fact Finding lives inside each client workspace.
2. Choose a template: Select a starting point that matches your approach (Holistic, Value Acceleration, Minimal, or a custom template). For more information on templates, see Fact Finding Templates.
3. Gather information: Record notes, upload files, and answer questions assignedto others on the exit team.
4. Surface insights: Once you start adding data, use Sensemaking to transform that information into guidance and strategy.
5. Deliver the story: Pull the same data into Deliverables to create tailored reports that stay up to date automatically.

Customizing business factors

When you create a new client, you can choose a template to start with. This will give you a starting point for which questions are shown within each business factor, although they can also be fully customized to your unique process, the client's situation, or the business' industry and maturity.

At this time, you can only select a template once when you create a new client. From there, you need to manually customize the business factors to your needs. We'll be adding the ability to combine and extend the template you selected when you create a new client in the future, but in the meantime, reach out to hello@exitwithella.io if you chose the wrong template or need to make significant changes.

For more information on templates, see Fact Finding Templates.