A Good Exit Strategy is Worth a Fortune.
Selling your business can be an organized process where each step maximizes profit and your advance preparation expedites the sale, or it can be a dismal failure full of gut wrenching interactions and tremendous amounts of your money left on the table at the close. Fortunately the choice is yours. A good Exit Strategy starts with simple awareness of the process of selling and can be implemented in advance in your day to day activities with little additional effort. Thinking of the sale of your business in health terms, consider the sale with no preparation as last minute surgery with no anesthesia, and a properly done Exit Strategy as preventative medicine that will keep you out of the pain and cost of surgery.
Your Exit Strategy begins with awareness that one day you will sell your business. Reasons vary with each business owner and can be as simple as boredom with your own company that you have built, to complex issues such as health or divorce. Only you know when it is time for you to sell. However having implemented a written Exit Strategy will assure maximum profit at the sale and great peace of mind should you be selling under less favorable circumstances such as the mental duress of a downturn in business or poor health.
Key steps to an Exit Strategy are as follows:
- Set a timeline. It is important to establish a timeline so that you can prepare in advance to maximize your sales price. It can take in excess of one year from the time of listing a business to actually get it sold. And there are a number of things as mentioned below that you will need to do in advance of “going to market”. When is the best time to sell? When you have growing revenues and peak profit performance, yet untapped growth potential is still evident.