Intangible Values

I'm often asked by campground owners how to make sure they get the highest selling price if they're thinking about selling their business. One of the things that is often overlooked in the sale of the business are the intangible items. Things like your brand, your website, your customer list. Those are not part of the traditional financial statements in America. They're not part of gaap. So we don't know how to value them. So we just skip them, basically. But they hold great value to a purchaser. So just as an example, if there are two equivalent campgrounds across the street from each other that have both been in business for the same amount of time, have the same amount of sites, very correspondingly the same, but one of them has an awesome website and a brand where they sell their T shirts and other items in their camp store versus the other one, who doesn't have any of that, who doesn't have a website, doesn't have a list of their customers, doesn't have branding. Which one's more valuable? Well, by looking at just financial statements, you may think they're equal. But when we look at the intangible things, the intellectual property involved, their value is very different. So I suggest that every campground owner create an ongoing list of the intangibles for your park. First off, start easy, your website. Obviously many of you have built up websites and have great presence on them. Strive for that. Are you number one in the search for your local area for campgrounds? Do you have any special site references that people always find you for because you have a lazy river or you have gem mining or some other topic specific to your park that you marketed on? Those are very valuable, so list that out. I suggest even looking at the traffic for your website. How many visitors are on your site in a particular day, month, year equivalent? How many make purchases or book from your website? A big thing now is look at the booking percentage. How many sites do you book from your online reservation system versus by phone? Obviously that's a big deal. The one that books more online is probably going to have an easier time from staffing perspective and less workload for a new owner. So it's very important to list out. Also, do you have a standard operating procedures manual? Do you have written or documented procedures for doing certain things like hosting rallies or maybe even where all of your emergency cutoffs are very important things to document. I always suggest documentation is a big, big deal in selling a park because it makes stepping into those shoes as a new owner a lot easier and a lot less battles to fight and things to learn. And lastly, your customer list. Really, nowadays, there's no reason you shouldn't be getting a great customer list, including your customer's name, address, cell phone number, email address. You have a lot of information there, and if people are just keeping just names or just email addresses, they're really doing a disservice to the value of their business. That information as a whole is a great marketing campaign in the works, whether you do it or not, but it's great intellectual property. So in your intellectual property statement, you also should list out how many guest names and information and emails do you have? Do you do targeted emails and get a certain response rate on your emails? That's also important. So I'd love to hear your suggestions of other things that you feel are intangibles that make your park special other than just what's on your financial statements. Let's have a conversation about this.

I'm Donna Bordeaux from campgroundaccounting.com Please follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Make sure you check out our blog and our website from the link below. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell to be notified when we post. To contact me, email me@donnacampgroundaccounting.com.