Is Good Enough, Good Enough to Sell?

Everything is humming along: The business is making you money. You pay yourself, your people, and meet your expenses. You have satisfied clients. It is what you envisioned. You worked on building it over the years, and now it is stable and running well. So, is this good enough to sell?

Here is my response. “Maybe yes, and maybe no”. It depends on what ‘sell’ means to you and what it means to the buyer. You cannot tell until you have evaluated what you hope to get out of the sale, and also investigated what a buyer may want. The key to creating something that both of you will be happy with, is to prepare your business to align with both yours and your buyer’s needs and wants.

What Do You Want and Need?

Many owners come to the end of their time in their business and they go to sell, and realize they cannot get what they hoped, out of the business, because the buyer does not see the same value as you perceive the business is worth. Evaluating what you want and need requires you to know what you realistically can get from the sale.

To determine what YOU may want for your future, see my past article on how to evaluate your exit readiness.

What Does the Buyer Want?

Before you can identify what the buyer wants, you need to identify who the buyer is. Like when you first started marketing and selling your products or services, you first needed to identify who you are selling to, so you can create something that they need and will want to buy. You spent a lot of time creating a message, a brand, a desire, for your product or service in your business. You know how important it is that you are using your time and money wisely when it comes to selling and marketing your product or service. Now you want to sell your business, yet you have not spent any time creating a business that will be attractive to a buyer you have not yet identified. You are just going to hope that someone wants to pay for something you have no idea is valuable to anyone else but you.

Years to Get Ready?

If you are years away from even thinking about leaving your business, then THIS IS THE TIME to do the work of creating something of value for the buyer. By starting now, you create something with years of evidence of the value it has for the buyer you have identified. When it comes time to approach them, they will know exactly how it fits into their future plans, because you have made it obvious in what you built, and they can then see it is worth buying.

Good enough it only good enough to sell if it is good enough for the buyer to pay for.

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“This article is 100% original content – The articles you read in this blog are created by Barb Stuhlemmer, not by AI.”

Did you miss our last EXIT event? Our guest in June was Larry Hoover, sharing incredibly important insights about you and your business’s future.

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