Does this profile describe you?
- Business owner with employees
- Single owner, partnership or shareholders
- Revenues greater than $750,000 to $100,000,000
- More than 8 employees
- An industry with a future
- Committed to making sure you get a return on your investment from your company by making it attractive to the next owner
- You want to leave a lasting legacy – a great place to work for your employees, a reliable ‘go to’ business for all your fans (customers and clients!) and a rest for you from the day to day functioning at the helm
- You want to build the plan for how you will make your company saleable
- You want your company to be more profitable on the way to making it saleable
- You are the kind of person who can get comfortable with the uncomfortable. Making a business saleable means making changes inside of you and your company. You can handle that because you’ve handled all the other changes your company has gone through.
- You’ve read HOW TO INCREASE THE VALUE OF YOUR BUSINESS BEFORE YOU SELL
- You have made your decision: You are not going to be happy only having a lifestyle business that will have to close one day when you can’t transfer it or sell it. You want more. You want to be able to attract a buyer that pays you a premium. IF YOU HAVE NOT MADE THIS DECISION YET, please buy
“How to Increase the Value of Your Business BEFORE You Sell… and Make It More Profitable Now”
and learn how to make this decision so it fits your goals, intentions and desired lifestyle.
If You Have Made This Decision And Are Ready To Commit To Making Your Business Saleable, You Need To Build Your Saleability Blueprint.
You need to work through these books so that you can know how to build your Saleability Blueprint. It is the first system available anywhere on how to make the right changes inside your organization and in your personal life to get a return on all the love, care and money you’ve invested in your business.
Why We Wrote This Book
In a word, we want as many business owners in this world as possible to get a return from their life’s work.
We want to make that difference for you, because you make a difference in your world.
Did you know that what you do for your employees, for your local economy and for your customers is a vital part of our economic engine?
We want your business to continue to drive economic value – and make a huge financial difference for you and your family.
If you want to make a real difference then you have to face facts.
More Than 90% Of Business Owners Attempting To Sell Their Companies Are Failing At the Finish Line. Many Don’t Ever Get a Chance to Play.
What you don’t know about what it takes to get into the 10% of owners that are wining a premium return on their investment is killing your chances. This means you might be:
Failing to close the deal.
Failing to earn a buyer’s interest.
Failing to get on the radar of prospective buyers.
Failing to learn in time what it takes to transfer ownership to an employee or a family member.
Failing to make their company saleable before life throws a curve ball and suddenly selling is the only option. And can’t.
Failing to recognize that a successful business is actually one that thrives long after the owner is not at the helm anymore, not in control anymore.
Failing to learn in time that a succession plan is useless without making the company saleable.
Failing to recognize the warning signs that it’s time to make sure there is a chance to get a return on the investment by selling the business.
Failing to learn that it takes 2-4 years to make a company saleable.
Failing to learn that it takes a game plan to make a company saleable.
Failing to recognize that 9 times out of 10, the best course of action is to have someone else lead the company to its future rather than do that job off the side of the desk while still working functionally in the business.
But This Is NOT Going To Happen To You Or Your Partners And Shareholders.
You Won’t Find Yourself Stuck After So Many Years Of Success.
You are Smarter and Wiser Than That
We want to eliminate failure as an option.
We thought it was plainly ridiculous that just because no one has broken down this massively confusing, complicated, messy process into manageable steps shouldn’t mean that business owners suffer.
Just because there is no incentive for buyers to share the black box of what they look for when buying a business, why should business owners lose out on this information?
We don’t want to sit around and witness all this potential failure.
We want to share what we know about making a company saleable with more business owners than just our clients.
We’ve worked with more than 100 successful mid-size business owners over the years. Lots of employees, great products, happy customers and many accomplishments.
But no game plan for how they’ll get a return on their investment. Just lots of confusion about topics like tax and succession planning… which have nothing to do with being able to sell a company.
And fear. Fear that if they spent time thinking about something ‘so far away’ that it meant they didn’t have mojo anymore. That the end was near. That they had become irrelevant or not able to lead their company to the heights of their ambition.
Just to set the record straight in case any of these thoughts make you squirm:
- Fear is natural. Feel it. It has great information to share about what might be important to you that you are not paying attention to… like what would happen to your company, your wealth, your employees or your family if your knowledge and skill wasn’t available to the company anymore?
- Smart investors start with the exit in mind. Technology business owners do it. You do it with your stock portfolio. You hope your financial advisor does it. There is a prime time to transform your illiquid asset into a liquid asset. It will not correlate to a time when you suddenly ‘feel ready’ to exit.
- You are not your company. It has shelf life and so do you. The time horizons quite different. What is best for your company is what is best for you. Not the other way around. If you want a return on your investment, your job is to lead the exit, not work in the company in a functional role it would be hard to find a successor for.
So now that we have squared away some myths that are standing in the way of you and your big exit payday, let’s get to the big picture.
When we think about the fact that there are more than 2.8 million business owners in North America over 55 and they have not yet discovered their companies are unsaleable in their current state, we see a big storm on the horizon.
We See A Big Economic Hurricane.
If these companies that power 50% of our economy don’t find buyers, don’t find some one to transition the company, they will close one day.
Shrinking our already fragile economy. Expanding the ranks of the unemployed.
And severely limiting the financial options of the business owner and his or her family, who had to close the company for lack of a saleable enterprise.
And we got mad. Mad enough to say “someone has to do something about waking up business owners”.
Mad enough to take what we know and write three books about how to get a return on your investment from making a business saleable. Nothing like having a passion to make a different to change lives by making something profound happen.
You See We Know Something Most Business Owners Don’t.
We know what buyers look for. What banks require when lending to employees or family members to buyout the owner(s)of a business.
When we meet strategic buyers, private equity, banks, and business brokers, we hear a common theme:
“We can’t buy a company that isn’t optimized so that we can take it over and get the same success as the current owner. How come more business owners think they can sell something that hasn’t been made saleable. It’s heartbreaking for them. For us, we just keep looking for the owner that has taken the trouble to do the work inside their operation to remove the risks we see.”
Business owners don’t typically hear this little gripe until they are sitting across the table from a buyer who is passing on the “deal”.
We know what buyers want. We know what to do to make a company saleable. We’ve done it many times for our clients.
So all we had to do was write about it and publish the book.
Of course that is far easier to say than do.
We spent years honing our approach to making a company saleable.
We Love Helping An Owner Make The Transition From Working In The Business To Working On The Business To Not Being At The Business Anymore.
It takes two to four years to do this and we work alongside the owners and their management team to make this transformation from unsaleable business to saleable ‘go-to’ company stick.
We had to find a way to show readers how to do this for themselves, step by step. On top of our day jobs making companies saleable for our clients.
Two years later, the book emerged. Kind of like delivering a new product.Or a baby.Or launching a business.Lots of editing, refining, reframing, and testing.
Our Number One Goal Was And Still Is That These Books Had To Be Self-Explanatory.
A business owner had to be able to go through the book and the playbook and come out the other end with a Saleability Blueprint – the game plan for what changes to make inside the business to make it saleable and when to do them to become what a buyer is looking for.
You will be happy to discover that the book and the playbook work. It’s simple really. (OK, it’s not just us making this claim. Our clients have read it and confirm it!)
You read the book. At the end of each chapter, you do the exercises explained in the Playbook.
By The End Of Both The Book And The Playbook, You Know How To Make Your Particular Company Saleable.
And who would be the likely ideal buyer.
And what it’s worth at the moment.
And how to make it worth what you really want to sell it for.
And how to avoid the legal, people, financial and change leadership landmines that ruin the best of intentions.
And who to bring on to advise you.
And when you need advisors because making a business saleable requires skills and expertise from people who done this. You wouldn’t build a house yourself if you had never built anything before. Don’t try your hand at this without help.
And how to find the leaks in your business that buyers look for that tell them there is too much risk… and how to fix these issues.
And how to make decisions that before seemed too hard to make.
And how to find your replacement.
And how to dream up your next act.
And how to motivate you, your management team and your customer base without telling them that you are now positioning the company for sale and still feel good about who you are and what you are doing.
And how to become more profitable, more productive and have more fun at work on the way.
When You Have Finished the Book and Playbook You Will Have the Right Action Plan that Fits Your Wishes, Your Company and Your Financial Goals
Imagine knowing for certain:
- When you will exit.
- That your business will be more profitable in the meantime.
- That because it is more profitable, it is more productive which makes it less of a burden to lead.
- Which organization or people will be your ideal buyer.
- That your company will thrive on into the future.
- That your next act will be satisfying and rewarding, post exit.
- That you will be able to sell it for the amount that you want AND that your company will be worth that amount come the day your ideal buyer comes courting.
- That your company may be worth 2 times or even 3 times its current value to your ideal buyer. That increase in value comes from making it saleable. For some owners, it will mean becoming instant millionaires.
- Making your company saleable delivers you a winning lottery ticket with life-altering wealth.
