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- 🫠 Keeping the sale in mind from day 1, how to make sure you can sell your business 🚀
🫠 Keeping the sale in mind from day 1, how to make sure you can sell your business 🚀
🧑💼 When starting out as a first time serious business owner I was unable to to sell my business the first time I tried b/c of the follow...
Lundin Matthews
June 23, 2023
When I started out my business I made a few mistakes, ok a lot of mistakes, one of these mistakes was not priming my business for a sale from day one and it cost me a sale but I learned the hard way how to get a business ready for a sale.
✋ Ensure you have a team
Your goal should be to work yourself out of the day to day operations. I’m sure you have heard the saying work on the business & not in the business. This is exactly what this means. When you go to sell if the buyer asks you who does XYZ and the answer is you then you will not be able to sell for top dollar. You would only be able to sell to someone wanting to buy a job or they would require you to stay on and help. Not only will this help you with a sell but this will help you grow and expand the business.
📕 Have clean books
As soon as your able to hire someone to do your book keeping, accounting, and taxes do it. I made the mistake of walking into a sale opportunity with books my wife had done, it wasn’t a good look and lead to way more questions from the potentional buyer. After the deal fell apart I hired a service to do our book keeping and taxes, it saved my so much time and effort. Not only is this good for when your ready to sell but it took stress off me while still running the business to get a much better idea of the health of the business monthly.
✍️ Have contractor agreements in place
Make sure that if you use contractors you have documentation in place clearing giving away IP rights. If not you will have to go track down any contractors you have ever worked with and ask them to sign some legal documents. It is much simpler to do this when you hire the contractor. This will also save you from IP ownership issues while your still running the business.
📄 Document your systems
Putting documentation in place ads to the sale and gives the buyer comfort that they can pick up from day one, it also is great b/c even if you do not end up selling you now have documentation on how your business runs.
🎁 Wrap up
While not an exhaustive list these are some of the key issues I had when we tried to sell my company. I had been treating it almost as a hobby up to that point and wasn’t ready for the sale. After our 6 months of due diligence fell apart I never wanted that to happen again, so I cleaned up my act. Make sure when you start building your business you build with the sell in mind even if you never plan to sell as it will help ensure a smooth business operation.
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