I was just about to say, “Everyone knows the best way to prepare your business for sale is to demonstrate that it can run without your direct involvement. In other words, without you actually being there.
“A prospective buyer needs to know the business will survive without you, that decisions will be made, bills paid and important tasks carried out without you orchestrating every move. He or she must also know that the business is capable of not only funding the buy-out, but that it will generate enough profit to sustain the new owners as well.”
I was about to say that until I realized that after more than 26 years of speaking and writing to this industry, it’s become rather obvious that not everyone got the memo.
It’s just as obvious not everyone knows how really critical it is to build a business that is “sale ready” or the best way to prepare their business for sale. If they did, their purpose, attitude and actions seemingly would be quite different.
Most shop owners act as if “profit” is a dirty word, something to be embarrassed by or ashamed of. They act as if process, policies and procedures are for everyone else, that they are constraining and restrictive. And that somehow struggle is more honorable than success.
Most shop owners are only too willing to accept adequate rather than endure the discomfort and frustration that walks hand-in-hand with excellence. They would rather adjust their wants, needs and expectations to fit their current reality than force their current reality to conform to a bigger, brighter vision, albeit a somehow more elusive one.
There was a time that bothered me deeply. There was a time I would raise my fists to the sky and curse the heavens for the reality most of us are only too willing to accept as unavoidable. There was a time I almost let it destroy me. That was before I began to understand that there are those among us who would rather remain ignorant; those who would rather not know.
Know what?
That successful people are successful because they are willing to do the things successful people do — the things those who are only interested in talking about success are unwilling to do. In fact, they force themselves to do those things. And, that those things are generally difficult, unfamiliar — at least in the beginning when you first start doing them — and almost always uncomfortable.
Their sense of purpose, the need to provide for and take care of their families, their employees, their clients and themselves, forms their belief system and their beliefs drive their behaviors.
Their behaviors are not typical and, therefore, neither are their results.
The Chinese definition of insanity suggests that doing the same thing the same way, while waiting (and hoping) for a new and different outcome ultimately will prove unproductive and frustrating, and is more than just a little nuts.
So, here’s the big question. Are you one of the “everyone” who knows what the best way to prepare your business for sale is? Can you see the importance, the critical need, to create a business that can and will function without your being intimately involved in every detail of its day-to-day operations? Do you see the importance of creating a business capable of more than just adequate, more than just the need to take care of only imminent and immediate needs?
If you are and if you do, you already have learned perhaps the most critical of all business management lessons: That to succeed you must do those things the majority of the shop owners currently struggling to survive within our industry are unwilling (not necessarily unable or incapable of) to do.
What are those things? Do you know? If you do, what did you have to do? How did you do it? And, would you be willing to share both your story and your results with an industry in dire need of a few great success stories?
