Should You Build A Business To Sell? - Building a Company that has Value and Makes Profit

Hi everybody. In today's video I'm going to discuss the topic should you build your business to sell? So I've read tons of books and watched tons of different opinions on whether you should build your business to sell. I myself is one minute been building the business to sell and then building the business to keep forever. I think it's important just to take away that no matter whether you're going to sell your business or not, the business needs to be able to run without you. So not fully. So as a business owner entrepreneur, you're always going to have that impact, be the face of the business, whether you're driving sales and marketing. I think the most important thing when you are building a business is to make sure that you're strong in terms of either marketing your business out to customers or being able to sell and win clients for your business. I think those are the two key areas that you can't really outsource or as well as you do it yourself. The operational stuff I think is for me, the last 18 months I've been working hard, just trying to systemise and hand off as much as the operations as possible to Melissa and my team, who does a great job by the way. So she's our office manager. That helps with that then based on one of my books, I've recommended tons of times called Build to Sell by John Warlow. He's also got a fantastic podcast as well and he talks around focusing on one thing that your business sells. So for them they were marketing agency and then they just started to specialize in logos, then replicated that model in terms of building a team of four salespeople, a marketing delivery person and an operational person. So it depends because I think as an entrepreneur as well, like growing, you always want to be, it's part of the journey. So the end goal to sell is great. But I think after speaking to many successful multi millionaire business people that have sold businesses, they've got bored quite quickly once they've exited the company and it gives people great choice. But I think I would just want to dive straight into business again. So I think for me is always have the mindset of if at any point I wanted to sell the business, could I. We're definitely not in that shape yet. I wish we were, even though I think about it every day in terms of making sure we've got systems and processes in place. I think as the business evolves and the bigger revenue we get and the more staff we get, more predictable income gets, then the more attractive that is. But Sometimes that's not the end goal. But I did learn a really good point from James Sinclair who I follow on a YouTube channel as well and he was talking around having like an end date for your business. So I did that the other day actually written down the end of 2022 and and what revenue I wanted to get to. So our target was to get to £6 million revenue, £2 million EBIT from there and I think it was 23 to 25 stuff. So I've actually written all of that down on where we need to get to over the next three years and that gives us a nice stretch target to reach onto just then in three years time. If the opportunity came to maybe sell a business we might look at it. But I think realistically for me, I love business so much and I love my company so much that probably wouldn't be the case but it's a nice position to be in. So I think everyone's different. What I don't want to be is when I'm 60, 70 and I'm stuck in the business and I can't get out of it and I've put 20, 30 years into it, which most business owners do, they don't think about do like building the business to sell well, want to get out of the company, wanted to pass it on a family, the sons or daughters don't want to take it over and then they end up having to give the business away. So I definitely wouldn't want to be in that position and I think I'd love to experience one day doing those business deals, transactions whether it is rolling up acquirement companies or doing a full life cycle of building the business from startup all the way to completion. But I think it's definitely early days here but I would like anyone listening or watching what your comments are around your experience, whether you should build a business or sell. I think there's no right or wrong answer but it's definitely having the mindset and putting the business in a strong state that it can support everything and work without you. So if you're going to take a holiday for six weeks, kind of run without you. So previous video I've just recorded around what our plans are for 2020. I want to try and get back to having a good lifestyle of four or five like nice trips away. So that will be a test to see how the business performs when you are away, what breaks? So after two or three weeks what's going to break in the business where something's going wrong? Because if it is then obviously I can come back and fix it and make sure that doesn't happen next time. So it's always a good test in terms of how your business performs without you as well. So drop your comments below. What are your thoughts around should you build a business to sell? Yes or no? What are the great books that you've read? Little stories around other business entrepreneurs that have successfully done it and what that experience was like and did they regret it or were they happy doing it? So thanks. Obviously there'll be a subscribe now button as well, so if you want to hear more stories around me as a business owner or any marketing or sales tips, feel free to subscribe and I'll speak to you soon. Cheers. Hi, thanks for watching today's video. If you like what you've seen, please like and subscribe the button with Entrepreneur James so you keep up to date with all of the updated videos. If you've got any questions or comments, I'd love to hear from you. So please drop a comment in Entrepreneur Gems below and we'll look to answer those on a weekly Q and A video. Keep an eye out for any future videos that we'll be posting. I'll be popping the video in here probably every one to two days. Thank you.