For a considerable number of years, I, together with my colleagues in Aarhus and in particular Mette Neville, have argued that exit rules in private companies, especially in SME’s, are necessary. Exit rules may be defined as rules which under certain conditions provide a shareholder with a right to have his or her shares redeemed by the company or, as the case might be, be purchased by other (majority) shareholders in the company; in other words the company or other (majority) shareholders have an obligation to - under certain conditions - redeem the shares or purchase them. The research Mette Neville has done on the subject has contributed considerably to the general understanding of it, including my own. My contribution has been more limited in scope, focusing on the necessity of exit rules and can only be viewed as supplemental to Mette Neville’s excellent research. The reason why exit rules are necessary in private companies is that there are typically one significant and fundamental difference between private companies and publicly traded companies. This significant and fundamental difference is that shares in publicly traded companies have a standardized market which shares in private companies do not have. Since there is no standardized market for the shares there is regularly a lock-in effect in the sense that (minority-) shareholders in the absence of contractual rules or corporate rules in law or the articles of association cannot sell their shares because of lack of normal market conditions or at least not sell them on “fair conditions”, i.e. to a price which reflects the information of the company had the information been available.In this article, I will try to illustrate why a exit right is recognized in some countries while in others it is difficult, if not near-impossible, to even have an academic discussion on the subject as a whole, the different de jure and de facto strategies which exist to accomplish an exit right, and what the consequences of the different strategies are – for shareholders, the lawmaker or, in economic terms, for economic growth.SMEs (micro, small and medium-sized enterprises) are, in a European context, enterprises which employ fewer than 250 persons and which have an annual turnover not exceeding EUR 50 million and/or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding EUR 43 million. SMEs are considered, by the European Commission, as the engines of the European economy – and presumably rightly so. In 2013, over 21 million SMEs provided 88.8 million jobs throughout the EU. 90 % of all enterprises are SMEs, with SMEs attributed with generating two out of three employments in the EU. In addition, SMEs are said to be the major focus of EU policy, the European Commission aiming to promote entrepreneurship and improve the business environment for SMEs. SMEs are not necessarily private companies and a private company is not necessarily a SME. However, in most cases, a private company is a SME. But the question of exit right must be distinguished from either of those two entities. In a previous article, I used four assumptions to identify a close corporation. On that basis, I went on to discuss the need for an exit right in close corporations. In this paper, I will use a different systematic approach.