Preparing your business for sale or taking on investors is quite a bit of work. Fortunately, many of the steps you must take to exit your business or take on investors are the exact steps you must take if you want to be able to step away from your company.
Recently, Adi Klevit spoke with Marie Torossian, CPA Advisor and Business Coach at Marie Torossian CPA. During this conversation, they shared five essential steps for creating a business that others can be comfortable investing in or purchasing.
These five steps align with those taken by other delegation advisors and business owners who have stepped away from their businesses’ day-to-day operations.
This article is for you whether you want to exit in the next few years, want to attract investment in your company, or are hoping to step away from your business while still supporting growth.
Five Steps for Preparing Your Business for Investment or Sale
1. Document all essential systems.
When a business has documented all essential and proprietary systems, it is a cohesive whole that can be transferred to new ownership or run by an expanded CSuite without losing what makes it unique. This means that an owner can sell the business, step away from it, or gain new investors without losing the special spark that makes their company what it is.
2. Create consistent revenue streams.
Some business owners create companies that are essentially new jobs for themselves. In these companies, there is a constant need to hustle, find new work, and build new products to continue to bring in the money needed. Instead of creating a constant need to hustle, consider building consistency into your revenue streams. This may include offering maintenance services on a product, offering a service as a subscription, or providing any number of additional ways that customers can continue to interact with your company.
3. Build an excellent client acquisition process.
Of course, consistency in any business begins with customer acquisition. Your customer acquisition process must be replicable by new salespeople as they are onboarded. This means that the process has to be well defined, and you must delineate everything from the type of customer to the marketing best practices to the customer onboarding process.
4. Ensure retention with consistent customer service and contact policies.
Building strong business policies, in general, will help you create consistency in your business. However, explicitly building policies around customer service and customer contact will provide your customers and potential customers with consistency whenever they interact with your company. Creating a consistent experience brings customers back and encourages them to recommend your business to a friend.
5. Delegate so you can step away from day-to-day operations.
It’s vital to delegate anything that is no longer in your purview as a CEO so that you can focus on the big picture and step away from the day-to-day. Not only does delegation enable you to fully inhabit your job as a CEO, but it also gives you a chance to take time away from your business and opens up the possibility of making a smooth exit.
Are you ready to build consistent processes and policies into your business, but aren’t sure where to start? Get in touch with the experts at Business Success Consulting Group today.
