Darryl Bates-Brownsword tells business owners to start preparing for an exit years before they plan to sell. Instead of just chasing profit, shift to growing valuation by thinking like a buyer and building exit-ready practices quietly, without signaling a sale.
If you really want to maximize the value of your business and you've been working in your business or on your business or running the business and owning your business for years and you've been focusing on your growth, there's a couple of ways you can handle the question. If you go, look, I don't really want to potentially leak out to the marketplace that I'm getting exit ready, even though it might be a number of years off. The first thing I'd encourage you to do is start looking at your business instead of just looking at profit and revenue growth. Like a lot of people are saying, hey, look, you've got to grow your business, grow your business. They normally mean the the profitability and/or the revenue in your business. My encouragement to you is start, you know, make that mindset shift from profit growth to valuation growth.
