Lofty idea or strategic goal? The latter!
Speak to most business owners and the feeling of being trapped in their business will come up often. Feeling trapped in your business results in you constantly chasing daily tasks and not being able to rise above the noise and work on your business. So how do you find the Freedom to move from this state?
Focus on building a sellable business. Having a sellable business is the goal and brings you, the Business Owner, the ultimate Freedom.
You might be thinking, “I don’t want to sell my business” or “how does having a sellable business result in the ultimate freedom?” Let’s elaborate a little.
A sellable business gives you options. It allows you to choose how you operate in your business and allows you to grow one of the biggest assets in your and/ or your shareholders personal financial portfolio.
Sellable means you give yourself the following options:
- Your business will start scaling when you start building it to be sellable.
- Working in your business – being an employee – you earn a monthly salary and bonus/ commission structures. If you’re already earning a salary from your business, is this by choice or need? By having a sellable business, you choose to work in your business, not need to work in your business.
- Remove yourself from the daily operations and let your management team or Directors run the business for you. You can choose to either be a shareholder only, drawing dividends and growing your share value or you can choose to part of the Board of Directors and steer the business.
- You can hand over your business as a legacy to your family or management teams. Your business could live well past your lifetime and be handed down to your children or Management to continue past you.
Interesting, that when this post was written, Yvon Chouinard had just announce that his business, Patagonia, will be handed down and have only one shareholder after his death. The Earth. Leaving his 3-billion-dollar business to assist in the climate effort as his legacy. A great example of building a legacy business.
- You can sell your business or parts of it to competitors or other interested parties. This can be for a return on your investment and capital gain, or as a means of growing your business with additional capital investment and partners.
With these options, you get to choose, and that choice is Freedom.
So how do you build a sellable business?
Without running through all the various aspects, you can find in OptiGrowth’s Executive Advisory Programs, there is a distinctive difference between Business Owners who are thinking entrepreneurially vs non-entrepreneurially.
An entrepreneur is constantly looking for the next big idea and when that idea comes around, they will have the ability to action them quickly. To do this, a great entrepreneur will quickly find other people capable to do what they don’t want to, can’t or don’t have time for. This means delegating tasks and functions and not holding on to them.
Delegating is a complex effort. It requires a business model that can work, processes that keep the standards and quality of the business to its highest levels and, most difficult of it all, finding the right people to deliver to these.
Your business becomes most sellable as soon you can get the business to operate with little to no input from you, as the founder and owner. That means that if you are removed from day-to-day activities, the business will operate to the same standard, as if you were there.