Making You Business Scaleable and Sellable (Takes about 2 to 3 years)

1. What projects has the business done that make the most profitability? and has a unique difference from your competitors that they cannot easily replicate?
2. Niche down and productise
3. How did we go about making those profitable and unique projects a success from quoting the client to completion of the project?
4. Find 20 potential clients that would need your niched services (preferably existing clients) and contact them
5. Charge upfront (bill the full amount upfront, don’t be scared)
6. Make your Business memorable and referable
7. Create your step by step instructional manual (keep editing that manual till someone can implement without you watching them to the standard expected)
8. Present your new direction and process to your team (use examples e.g Southwest Airlines only use 1 type of plane)
9. Check-in on staff every so often to make sure they follow the process
10. Your in business to make money first then everything else second, don’t forget that
11. Say no to projects outside your expertise (clients will test you to work on projects outside your expertise be ready to say no, so you can be open to projects you excel at)
12. Create a business that can work without you
13. Hire 2 sales people to begin (they will compete with each other)
14. Think about the staff members you need for your new process, and remove those you don’t need. Identify who would be doing each stage of the process
15. Hire product based sales people (someone who knows their numbers, scientific selling, should be a fierce competitor wanting to win and disciplined). Service based sales people will try and bend your products to suit the clients needs instead of helping to keep your business productised.
16. Cut your clients that don’t fit in with your productised services
17. Create a sales statistics dashboard so your sales reps can compete and update their goals
18. Set financial, sales and marketing goals and how you are going to achieve them (aim for 25% a year)
19. Once you start growing start looking at building a management team
    1. Align their compensation with the goals of the business
    2. Use long term incentive plan to reward managers performance and loyalty to the company. (Give managers targets and corresponding bonus for achieving their personal targets. Pay those bonus at the end of each year and put aside the same bonus in a special pool of funds, which they can only draw out 1/3rd of the pool after 3 years and each year after they are allowed to withdraw another 1/3rd of the pool that way pool grew, if they left they would be walking away from 3 years worth of bonuses in the pool).
       Don’t offer equity it just gets messy
20. If you have excess money look at how you can best invest it to get a good rate of return
21. Ensure to keep hiring specialists, not generalists. 1 Specialist is worth the weight of up to 5 generalists
22. Do you still want to sell? Write up the pros and cons, make sure that you still want to sell as it is a length and drawn out process.

Selling Your Business Notes (can take 6 to 8 months)

1. Make sure to have everything in order that an acquiring company would want
   1. What’s the market potential in your location and nation wide
   2. Make your model so well that it’s easy to replicate in other areas like a franchised
   3. Have a predictable sales formula, where sales people are able to sell
   4. Have a model for your sales engine and how it works
   5. Demonstrate that your not the only sales person that can sell (prove a scalable sales model)
2. Avoid the 5 year buy out as much as possible (make the business work without you)
3. What price are you willing to sell your business for (put in an envelope in a safe place) (how much $$$ would you need to achieve your bucket list)
4. Ensure that you have a management team that can keep the business running when your gone
5. Get a good broker / advisor who you will be a meaningful account (boutique acquisitions firm – done deals in your industry)
   1. Choose a broker that is going to represent you and not present you as a gift to their best client.
6. Have a 3 year business plan (make sure it’s solid) think like Starbucks when writing your plan. Show how you can be an engine of growth for an acquire
   1. Imagine you have a blank cheque and unlimited resources (don’t be conservative), what is possible if I had more resources and $$$ (it does not have to be achieved able by just you)
   2. Stop referring to this years financial as a forecast, refer to projections for this year as current year
   3. Think big
   4. Change the name of the clients to customers and agency to business.
7. Look to get the interest of a strategic buyer over a financial buyer
8. Ensure to keep you eye on the businesses growth even though acquisitions advisor will be taking up most of your time
9. 9. Make sure that your business fits into the product acquisitions process not the service acquisitions process. (This is so you get more $$$ upfront and not in a earnout that you need to stay in the business for 6+ months and get your money once the business achieves it’s goals)
10. Treat an earn-out as the extra gravy on the deal
11. Inform your team of the buyout and what benefits it will bring to the staff
    1. Career advancements
    2. Big projects and budgets (prestige)
    3. Career mobility
    4. Give them $10,000 as a thank-you (stay bonus) for helping if the business gets acquired only to those that stay (In 6 parts over the next 6 months so they stay on after the acquisition)
12. Make sure you have the right answer to “why you want to sell your business”
    1. A buyer wants to hear you see a future for your business and you want their help to get you too the next level
    2. Tell them you are proud of what you have achieved so far and that you are at a point where you like to create some liquidity for the value you have created so far
    3. They need to feel that you will stay on to tap some of the synergies between the 2 businesses
13. Get a letter of intent from the company that was to acquire
14. Expect due diligence to happen and for them to low ball their original offer
    1. Record all the figures and how you worked them out
    2. Expect a grilling from the companies due diligence pit-bull (analytical person) to tear apart the inner workings of your business and question everything (remember only the boss can call him off)
    3. At 2-3 months it’s time to communicate that they have pushed you as far as they can, they are in jeopardy of losing the deal (spent 2 months of their time and 100’s of hours, so they don’t want to look bad to their boss)
    4. After the due diligence they will be concerned about specific parts of the business (get them to lay the cards on the table) (If what they said pisses you off open that envelope and read it)

Other notes

1. Engage a good accountant who has experience with succession planning + tax planning strategies