Don’t Sink Your Business

This is my kitchen for the next 4 weeks. All of my cabinets & counters have been removed, most of the floors (the rest goes this week), and… wait for it… no sink! We’ve moved a couple of cabinets and a counter top piece back in the room, so we have some space to work on, but there is no water in my kitchen.

We’ve been planning for this for over 6 months. It was not just imagining the end result, it was looking at every aspect that will be affected by this change and determining how to manage that aspect, as we go through it. For instance, how are we managing a home with a kitchen that has no sink? No, I’m not doing dishes in the bathroom, although, if that was my only option, we’d make that work. We are fortunate enough to have a laundry room with a new sink, just off the kitchen. We moved all the cupboard contents into bins and kept the items that we use most often, separate so we can easily find them. We brought in a a small outside table to house a utensil carousel and just enough dishes to give one for each person. And, did I mention that there are 4 adults living in this home? The key process that is working so far, is ensuring that if we use it we wash it, immediately.

This is clearly not all the steps we’ve had to develop to make this plan work, but this one aspect will make or break our team (family in this case) if we cannot manage operations in the kitchen for 4 weeks.

This is the same for planning your succession. You cannot hope to sell your business and have it continue as it always has, without you.  You MUST prepare your business to operate differently without you. Depending on how reliant your business is on you for the operations, sales, and delivery of the services, will determine how long that will take. Removing you is like removing the sink from the kitchen. How does this business now work without its key utility? It could be months, but more likely years for you and your team to make the full adjustment from you being ‘The One’ to a business that someone else could easily take over.

For us, thankfully, we have many years of camping expertise under our belt, so we could utilize some of the process and skills we already had available to us, and it is working. And, in four weeks, we will have a new kitchen, adding a huge amount of value to our home for future sale, plus enjoyable value now, for our own use.

Don’t SINK your business (I know – bad pun) because you think, “I’m not ready to exit yet”. Start the process now, and create value for your future sale, as well as value now, while you are still enjoying being the owner.