Hi everyone,
Here I am in my hotel room in beautiful Orlando Florida getting ready for the last couple nights of my vacation. This past month has been a wild time. Working hard on the business, while spending some quality time my wife and kids.
As my trip comes to an end, it makes me think about something that every business owner should think about your exit strategy!
What is your exit strategy? What are you doing or planning to do to be able to one day retire? Are you trying to scale your business and become a regional provider buying up all of your competitors? Are you planning to sell your business and retire? Are you planning on gifting your business to your children?
These are very real questions that you have to ask yourself as the business owner. And you should ask yourself as a business owner when you’re first getting started too. This is something that most business owners do not think about, but they should.
Here’s what happened to me back in 2009. My business partner was Brian, who was the owner of the company and I was the Director of Business Development. After I had been driving the business forward and generating thousands of dollars for the company, he made me his business partner. I became the Vice President and part owner of Care Choice. He had told me in private that for a variety of reasons he had plans to sell the business. So we discussed our exit plan and we put together a strategy that would be implemented in the next five years.
We started going through our due diligence, packaging up the entire company going through our financials, going through our operations, and everything to gear up for a nice sale to maximize our return on investment. Then towards the end of 2010, we found a buyer who presented us with a nice offer.
We went through the entire closing process which started in November of 2010 and wasn’t final until May of 2011. So closing on a multi-million dollar business takes a lot of time and due diligence in transactions and interviewing and going back and forth.
It was an amazing process that I’ll never forget and it’s something that I wanted to share with you because I know there are a lot of business owners out there who are thinking about retiring and you’re not sure what to do.
So again, I encourage you if you are thinking about retiring, if you’re thinking about selling your business, or if you’ve never thought about it before, make sure you have an exit strategy… some kind of plan in place. The smart business owners should be planning far in advance because you cannot predict what could happen in the future.
I’ll give you an example that occurred back in 2014. I was talking to one of my clients on a Monday and she was sick with the flu. Then on Wednesday, I kid you not, she passed away from the flu. It was a weird fluke and tragic event. Nobody can prepare for it, and it was the saddest day ever. I went to her franchise conference a few months later. So many people knew her and we were all devastated.
The reason why I’m mentioning this is because she didn’t have an exit strategy. And there is a lot of chaos that her family had to go through upon her passing. So again, it’s one of those things that we don’t think about often, but you want to make sure you’re prepared.
So there is your tip for the week! I love doing what I do and I love serve each and every one of you, so you can go out there and blow away the competition!
