Some business owners and entrepreneurs focus on growing their profits, while others are obsessed with sales goals. Have you ever considered making it your primary goal to set up your business so that it can thrive and grow without you?
A business not dependent on its owner is the ultimate asset to own. It allows you complete control over your time so that you can choose the projects you get involved in and the vacations you take.
When it comes to getting out, a business independent of its owner is worth a lot more than an owner-dependent company.
Maximum Possibilities can be your partner to ensure that your company has the proper valuation and is positioned well for when you are ready to sell.
Here are five ways to set up your business so that it can succeed without you.
1. Give Them a Stake in The Outcome
Jack Stack, the author of The Great Game of Business and A Stake in The Outcome wrote the book on creating an ownership culture inside your company. He advises that you be transparent about your financial results and allow employees to participate in your financial success. This results in employees who act like owners when you’re not around.
2. Get Them to Walk in Your Shoes
If you’re not quite comfortable opening the books to your employees, consider a simple management technique where you respond to every question your staff brings you with the same answer, “If you owned the company, what would you do?”
By forcing your employees to walk in your shoes, you get them thinking about their questions as you would. This technique also builds the habit where they start to think like an owner. Pretty soon, employees are able to solve their own problems.
3. Vet Your Offerings
Identify the products and services which require your personal involvement in either making, delivering, or selling them. Make a list of everything you sell and score each on a scale of 0 to 10 on how easy they are to teach an employee to handle. Assign a 10 to offerings that are easy to teach employees and give a lower score to anything that requires your personal attention. Commit to stopping to sell the lowest-scoring product or service on your list. Repeat this exercise every quarter.
4. Create Automatic Customers
Are you the company’s best salesperson? If so, you’ll need to fire yourself as your company’s rainmaker in order to get it to run without you.
One way to do this is to create a recurring revenue business model where customers buy from you automatically. Consider creating a service contract with your customers that offers to fulfill one of their ongoing needs on a regular basis.
5. Write an Instruction Manual for Your Business
Finally, make sure your company comes with instructions included. Write an employee manual or what MBA-types called Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). These are a set of rules employees can follow for repetitive tasks in your company. This will ensure employees have a rulebook they can follow when you’re not around. Additionally, when an employee leaves, their placement can quickly take on the duties of the job.
You-proofing your business has enormous benefits. It will allow you to create a valuable company and have a life. Your business will be free to scale up because it’s no longer dependent on you, its bottleneck. Best of all, it will be worth a lot more to a buyer whenever you’re ready to sell.
Maximize Yourself with Maximum Possibilities
At Maximum Possibilities, we care as much about you as a person as we do your business. We consider ourselves your partner in achieving the maximum potential for your business.
Your success is our success. Let’s discuss ways we can help you be the best entrepreneur. Then we can discuss the best practices to increase the value of your business, and how to position it for a potential merger or acquisition.
Contact us today and let’s get started building the future, today.