Business Valuations & Growth Consulting

What we hear most from business owners is that their exit plan is leaving in a pine box. Exit planning doesn’t have to be complicated or stressful. However, it does require dedication from the business owner – and sometimes management team – to set up properly. You have put so much of your blood, sweat, and tears into this business. Why are you willing to leave the exit up to chance?

– their largest asset when it comes to exit planning. We often make the correlation between the value of your business to the value of your home (if you own one). After years of spending time, money, and effort to improve the value of your home, would you ever leave one day and never come back? One day you decide to leave your house keys on the kitchen counter, unlock all the doors and leave your house for some stranger to come and occupy. Let that sink in… would you ever legitimately do that? Absolutely not. So why are you doing that with your business?

Minimal mindshare: 53 percent said they had given little to no attention to their transition plan at this point, even though three-quarters of respondents were age 51 or older.

No transition plan: 88 percent had no written plan to transition from the current owner (this includes 66 percent who had no plan at all). This figure is consistent with other recent surveys, including PwC’s recent survey of family-owned firms.

Going it alone: 80 percent had never sought advice about a transition.

1. Seek advice, 2. Work to boost your profits, 3. Increase sales and lower expenses, 4. Continue to invest and improve, 5. Create a strategic plan, 6. Develop repeatable, processes and empower your people, 7. Stand out from the crowd  [read full article]

An extraordinarily valuable lesson for both entrepreneurs and investors is that when you sell a business, a well designed and executed exit strategy can often increase the business valuation by 50%, and sometimes by 100%. … The business valuation can increase by 50 to 100% just because you sell the business well.

Management questions: One-third of surveyed owners had not even thought about management succession, and only 25 percent were comfortable that their managerial team would be successful if the owner wasn’t involved after the transition.