Adam Rossi built a 250-employee software company serving law enforcement and intelligence agencies. They routinely beat Lockheed Martin in head-to-head bids.

Then a banker came back with five acquisition offers — each at the "absurd" number Adam and his wife had thrown out as a hypothetical. The winning bid came from SRA International, a publicly traded defense contractor, for a price that created generational wealth for his family. Adam took all cash and walked away with no earn-out.

But as Adam discovered, the hard part wasn't negotiating the deal — it was figuring out what to do after it closed.