How Rachel Murphy and The Grafter Help Businesses Scale and Exit

Drawing on 25 years of experience with turnarounds, acquisitions, and integrations, Rachel Murphy has developed a combination of AI-supported analysis and hands-on guidance for founders.

Building a company may begin with a straightforward idea, but reaching the growth, funding, or exit stage can present challenges, particularly as a business begins to scale. Founders must often assess not only revenue but also operational maturity, leadership, processes, and the sustainability of the company’s economics.

Rachel Murphy founded The Grafter after scaling and exiting two of her own businesses. According to Murphy, she has spent 25 years working with companies undergoing rapid growth, turnarounds, acquisitions, and integrations. This has included both preparing businesses for sale and addressing operational problems that emerge during transactions.

“I’ve sat on both sides of the table,” Murphy says. “As the founder trying to get a business ready to sell, and as the operator brought in to fix something that’s gone wrong mid-deal. Most of what goes wrong is predictable. I built The Grafter so it stops being a surprise.”

The Grafter uses what it calls its Grow, Raise, Exit (GRE) methodology to help founders assess and prepare their companies. According to figures provided by Murphy, the firm has applied the methodology to 60 companies and contributed to the creation of £250 million in business value. She says The Grafter expects to support its 10th client exit in September and has helped healthcare scaleups raise £59 million.

Murphy also reports that every company The Grafter has worked with has achieved a return on its investment in the firm’s services within three months.

Combining Operators and AI

The Grafter’s approach combines AI-supported analysis with work carried out by experienced operators. Rather than relying solely on data or founder intuition, Murphy and her team aim to give clients a clearer understanding of what supports their businesses and what may be limiting their value.

The firm refers to its operators as “Exiteers.” According to Murphy, many have firsthand experience managing turnarounds and integrations. They work within client businesses to address operational gaps and help prepare them for potential investment or acquisition.

Supporting this work is an AI-driven platform designed to assess business maturity and profile unit economics. Murphy says the technology can also assist with tasks such as producing information memoranda and building data rooms, which are commonly used to present company information to prospective investors or buyers.

“We’re not selling founders a dashboard and walking away,” Murphy says. “The AI does the diagnostic and the heavy lifting on the paperwork. The Exiteers do the operating work inside the business.”

When working with The Grafter, business owners are encouraged to identify the activities and economic factors that contribute most directly to their performance. The company’s maturity diagnostic is intended to assess how developed and prepared a business is without relying solely on measures such as revenue.

“We blend technical business expertise and have a diagnostic that assesses the maturity of a business and can now profile based on unit economics leveraging the power of AI,” Murphy says.

Focusing on Sector Experience

The Grafter primarily works with professional services and healthcare businesses. Murphy says this focus is deliberate, allowing the firm to tailor its analysis to how companies in these sectors generate revenue and manage their particular operational and regulatory risks.

The £59 million reportedly raised for healthcare scaleups reflects this area of focus. Rather than applying the same framework identically across sectors, Murphy says the company adapts its work to the economics and challenges of each client’s business.

Understanding the Founder’s Role

For many founders, a business becomes closely connected to their identity. It can represent years of work, sacrifice and difficult decision-making, making the prospect of selling or bringing in outside investment emotionally complicated.

As a gay female founder who has experienced exits herself, Murphy says her identity informs how she approaches founders and the industries in which she works, including private equity, mergers and acquisitions and corporate finance.

“I don’t take the gay woman thing off before I walk into a room with PE investors,” she says. “It’s part of how I read situations, part of why I built Exiteers around real operating experience instead of credentials on paper, and part of why I don’t think founders should have to perform confidence they don’t feel to get taken seriously.”

The Grafter therefore aims to support founders through both the operational and personal dimensions of preparing for an exit. That work can begin well before a founder is ready to sell and may include examining the company’s processes, leadership, growth potential, and sustainable economics.

Addressing weaknesses in these areas may help a business present a clearer and more credible case to potential investors or buyers, although an eventual sale or investment cannot be guaranteed.

Preparing to Scale

Murphy emphasizes that preparing a business for growth or sale is generally not an overnight process. Decisions made during the scaling stage can affect how readily a company is later able to raise capital, integrate with another organization, or complete an exit.

The Grafter is continuing to develop its AI platform beyond diagnostics, including tools designed to support information memorandum generation and data-room preparation. At the same time, Murphy says the company intends to retain its emphasis on experienced operators and sector-specific knowledge as it expands.

“The goal was never to be the biggest,” she says. “It was to make sure every founder who comes through The Grafter gets the same thing I wish someone had given me: a straight answer, fast, and a system that actually gets you there.”