Are you planning for the future? If not, you need to start as soon as possible. Business expert Gene Marks outlines what you need to do now if you want to sell your business in the future.
Video Transcript
When smart business owners are looking ahead as to the value of their business you always have to be operating your business at the highest value that you can possibly get to. You always have to be thinking to yourself, when I sell this business will I be getting top – say, if I had to sell it today, would I be getting top dollar for it and, if not, you know, what do I need to do to get top dollar for it? Okay? If you sell your business and you have to stay on in your business as a consultant, right, then you are not doing what you gotta do today to get the top value for your business because you’ve gotta keep working and staying on in the business as a consultant. The person who’s buying your business, trust me, they don’t wanna have you staying on as a consultant either. You don’t wanna be doing it either. You like just wipe your hands clean and move on. If you’re staying on as a consultant there’s some – 10 years, there’s something you’re not doing today to create the organizational structure so that you don’t have to stay. The best example I can give you is, like, like a franchise, a typical fast food franchise. You know, if you own one of those they have procedures and policies and ways of doing things so that if a franchise owner sells a popular, you know, fast food restaurant to another person, to another franchise owner, that person doesn’t need that franchise owner to really stick around for very long because everything’s documented. There’s controls. There’s structure. There’s a away, you know, of things that will be done, and they could just move on with it. And often they pay more for that because they don’t want you hanging around. So, you know, if you are in a situation where you have to hang around, then there’s not a whole lot you can do about that. But if you think you can – you’re gonna sell your business sometime in the next 5 to 15 years, you have to say to yourself what should I be doing now so when I do sell this business I can sign on the dotted line and go out and play golf. And the kinds of things you need to be doing is putting the right people in place, the right management in place, the right infrastructure in place, the right technologies in place, the right data – there’s a whole bunch of stuff, right, so that that person can buy your business from you and move on with it, without having to involve you at all.
