Building a business can be a long journey that puts the owner through a roller coaster of emotions. An entrepreneur can go from high to low in one day and it is easy to want to throw the towel in and shut down your business. One way to help smooth out these emotional peeks and valleys is to consciously build and run your business as if you are trying to sell it all the time.
There are many reasons why someone may want to sell a business. Hopefully when a business is sold, it is for the right reasons and not the wrong reasons. Some reasons to sell a business are to cash out on the business value, to get out of a market that is too risky, and to just change settings and do something new.
Here are some tips that you can implement right now to act as if you were planning to sell your business that will help you to maximize the benefit of owning a business.
- Improve your income
- Concentrate on your core competency
- Build a business plan
- Make yourself redundant
- Think like a potential buyer
It is important to consider the personnel and the culture of your business as well and to analyze these factors to determine if your business is in tip-top shape. In his book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, author Verne Harnish lays out a sound framework for ensuring that your company is in maximum shape. He states that there are three pillars his sound business habits
- Priorities – does your organization have a list of top priorities for terms ranging from annually, quarterly, and monthly (if your business is growing at over 100% annually). It is especially important to have a clearly defined top priority and a theme that your team can associate with during the period
- Realtime Data – does your organization have sufficient data to provide the insights required to see how your organization is running? You should be able to analyze this data on a daily basis for some types of information. This is also important to determine what the marketplace is demanding and to adjust to these changes. Each of your team members should also have at least one key metric that drives his performance on a weekly basis.
- Rhythm – Does your organization have a balanced and effective rhythm of meetings on daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis? If so, are these meetings well-run and useful or are you just having meetings to have meetings.
Mastering the Rockefeller Habits goes on to talk about the X-Factor. This is the key chokepoint of your organization. At any one time, all organizations, even the most efficient ones, have a point that is less efficient than others. Identifying this for your organization will help you to overcome this and grow past it.
All organizations also encounter barriers to growth along their journey. Three key growth barriers are failing to effectively delegate to others, failing to implement effective systems and structures, and failure to properly use data to drive your actions. All organizations also want to ensure that they have the right people doing the right things. This may seem like common sense but it may not always be apparent that your team members are not performing the best task for their skills. Some questions to ask are do you have the right people, are you doing the right thing, and are you doing these right things right?
Maintaining a mindset for your business that it is always up for sale will help you to ensure that your daily actions are consistent with a long-term goal. This will also help you to steer the ship into calm waters whenever a problem may arise.