MBA2115 Q&A Wednesday: I feel trapped in my business. How do I get out?

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the place to be to get better at business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays, we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at Omar MBA Net. Today's question is from Mandy and Mandy asks Omar, I got a really tough situation on my hands. I've hesitated to email you about this, but I've gotten to a point where I need a solution. I feel stuck in my business. I've been running my business for over a decade. I've had some success, but it's not a wildly successful business. I need to get out of this business because I'm just not enjoying it. It's taking so much of my time and costing me so much money to run. This is why I feel stuck because I can't sell the business easily. It's not easy for me just to close my doors and disappoint my customers. I just Feel like I gotta keep on doing what I've been doing for the last 10 years and that makes me feel depressed. Would love any advice you can offer. Thanks, Mandy. I wanna start by saying that Mandy's situation is not uncommon. A lot of entrepreneurs go through this I've gone situation more than once. Creating and running a business is like taking care of a human being, a person. And you feel responsible, you feel like you just can't neglect it. There's so much emotion attached to the business, to the responsibility of the business. And if you're having a hard time selling it, it's even worse because no one wants to feel desperate and sell their business pennies on the dollar at the same time. Walking away would be very hard just to close down the business, disappointing customers. You might think it'll ruin your reputation. And what often happens is exactly what Mandy says. Just feel stuck. So you just continuing doing the same thing. Well, in today's episode, we're going to explore this situation. We're going to look at the options.

Deeply, we're going to walk through the.

Steps, we're going to actually look at each scenario and see what are the choices, what are the options for Mandy, what can she do, what are the trade offs and what are some of the decisions she's going to need to make to make some progress in this situation. But let me give you a little hint. The one thing we're not going to do is do nothing. Because doing the same thing over and over is going to get you the same result. And she's miserable, right? She's unhappy, she feels stuck, she feels trapped. So we got to do something new so that she doesn't have that feeling. Even if you replaces that situation with another one, another challenge. We'll get into that in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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So Mandy's feeling stuck. She can't sell her business easily. She doesn't want to just give it up for nothing or just shut it down because she doesn't want to disappoint her customers or the people that rely on her business or service. She doesn't want to keep on doing this business because it's costing her a lot of time and money and pain. So what does Mandy do? Well, sometimes as business owners, when we're faced with a conundrum, we're faced in a situation where we feel we have no choices. Is this is an emotional reaction. Just hear me out for a moment here, okay? It's an emotional reaction to our perception of our options. We think for a moment, I can't do this because of this. I can't do this because of that. And we never actually go past that point. We just have this almost like a deer in the headlights moment where it's like, nope, not gonna go there, because it's gonna cause me too much pain to even think about doing that option. So right now, I'm giving everybody who's listening to this episode license to think and about it, okay? You have the right to think about it. It's not going to hurt you. It's not going to kill you to think about something and to play out that scenario to its end as if it happened. Trust me, it will not kill you. Okay? So what Mandy needs to do and everybody else who's in this situation or is feeling the same way is look at the options. Okay? I'm going to give Mandy's options. And she named a couple. But there's more options than she actually has listed. Option number one is to sell the business at the best price possible. She might not get the price she wants. She might get a really low valuation, but she'll get some money. She'll get cash or value out of the business, and she'll be able to leave the business. That's scenario number one. We're going to get into that in a moment. Scenario number two, or option number two, is just to close the doors of the business. Guys, we're not operational. It's over. Thanks for your business. We're done. Everybody goes home. Customers, staff, everything else. Okay, I know that's painful, but that's. That's an option, okay, which has benefits. And we're going to get into that. Option number three, you remove yourself from the business, meaning you don't do anything in the business anymore. You become a business owner or an investor, so to speak, and you give the business to somebody else to run. Now you might be saying, omar, I don't have a lot of money to spend on salaries and all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of deals that could be struck. Whether it's equity, whether it's a base salary, whether it's performance based. There's a whole lot of different options there. There's many people out there that would love to take on a business that's already established and run it themselves instead of starting from something from scratch. Starting something from scratch is really hard, okay? So you have some traction. You've been running this business for 10 years. It has value. You might be able to get somebody to just come and take over at a price again. All these scenarios I'm listing have advantages, have disadvantages, and these are important because it's going to help us come to a decision. There's a fourth option, which a lot, a lot of people talk about, but is a huge option you may want to explore, and that's to change the business. Okay? You are probably upset for several reasons. You probably feel stuck, or you don't like this business anymore for different reasons. It could be the product itself, it could be the offering, it could be the customers you're serving. It could be the money it's making. It could be a whole lot of things. Right? You could change these things.

Okay?

You can change your business if you want to. And it's a whole lot easier to change a business than to start a new one because you already have the resources to do it. Meaning you have a team, you have systems, you have money coming in. You have clients that you can serve or sell to, new products or services. You can literally just turn your business around, offer new things, change it. So it is a business that you want. You might be daydreaming about a business that you want to start, but you can't because you have this business you're stuck with. I'm telling you, you can start that business within the business you have now. So four options. Sell the business, close down the business, get somebody to run the business, or four, change the business. Now, in each of these scenarios, what I want you to do is walk through what life would be like until the End point of that decision. And I want you to give the worst case scenario, or like the not so gener rosy picture scenario. For example, let's take option one, if you sold a business, let's go to the end of that decision. What does that mean? Let's walk through the steps. You put it up for sale. You might go to sites like Flippa or Microacquire.com or whatever it is, and you try to sell your business. You get nickeled and dimed. Worst case scenario, you get a really bad price. Almost insulting. Like this price is probably what it costs you to get started in the first place. Maybe it's just, you know, one year's annual revenue. It's a price you're not happy with. But you decide to sell. You sell it for that price. You have that money in the bank. You now freed up your time. You have some cash. It's not the cash you wanted. It's actually insulting. But it is cash. And you can spend it just like any other cash. And now you may want to start something new. What would you do with that cash? What does it look like? How would you invest it? Would you take some time off? What does that life look like? Okay, and you're going to do the same thing with the other three options. Play it out to the end. Don't be so generous. Don't be so optimistic. Just kind of give a sort of a pessimistic view. The reason why we do this pessimistic view thought experiment is so that when we make a decision, we're okay with that decision. Even if the worst version of that decision happens now, there's a likelihood that it will be a better result or it'll play out in a better fashion. And that's all gravy. But I want to make sure we're making decisions from a place where it's like such a hell yeah. That even if it's not everything we wanted it to be, we're still happy. And that leads me to an important point. Your most valuable asset in your life is your time. You can always make more money. You always can start a new business. You could always do new things 100%. But you can't make more time. So you can't continue to waste time in a situation you're unhappy. So I'm proud of Mandy that she wrote in and asked this question because she's kind of had it and now she wants to change her situation. But it's time to take action because you've wasted a lot of time In a situation that is not really where you want to be. The other thing is opportunity costs. Time is opportunity. If I'm spending time recording this podcast right now, that means I can't do everything else that I could possibly do in this time. And there's a lot of options. So I need to be content with the fact that I think this is a good use of my time to record this episode. When you work and think from this type of framework, you start to realize you have to make trade offs. You can't have it all. You might hire somebody to take over the business, you might go through that scenario and they're not going to do the job the way you want to, or maybe not as good as you, or make changes you're not happy with, but that's the trade off. You can't have it all, or at least you can't have it all all the time. Okay, if I went with the scenario where I changed the business, I might change the business and improve my revenue, improve the product, but I'm putting in extra work and time to make that happen again. I can't have everything. I gotta sacrifice something in this time effort. If I go down with closing down the business, yes, now I'm free of this business, I can do anything I want. I got my time back, but I didn't get any value from that business, meaning I didn't sell it for a price. I didn't extract any value from those 10 years. I got to be okay with that. Now, having said that, you did get 10 years of experience, right? The skills and the experience you got are with you. You can't pay bills with that, but you can build things with that. Coming to terms with the fact that there's going to be a sacrifice here, there's going to be a coming to terms and being content and being okay with that is going to make it easier for you to move forward and make a decision with your options. Now, by the way, I laid off of four options. These are the four options I just come up with. But there might be other options. I'm just trying to illustrate or give you some options so that we can have some fodder, some information, some examples to work off in this lesson. Now that we have a game plan, we know we have some options. We've played out all the scenarios to the not so optimistic, you know, endpoint. We understand there's trade offs. When you're saying that you have to make a decision. If we want to change, how do we take the first steps ondeck is.

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So what are the first steps? Well, the good news is first step is done. You've already gone through the thought experiment, you've gone through the scenarios. Maybe you haven't done it yet, but that's the first step really is to go through all the examples, all the options to the end with not such an optimistical point of view. So what's the first step in moving forward? Well, good news is what we just talked about today is the first step. It's just going through each scenario, playing it to the end with not such an optimistic point of view, and seeing which one we would be most content with once we've made a decision. The next step is to take action towards that decision. Say, for example, you want to sell your business, well, you got to find a buyer. So you may want to make a list of potential acquirers, maybe partners or people that are competitors or people that it might be a good strategic fit for them to buy you. Once you make that list of buyers, potential buyers, reach out to them. If you don't have their contact, find somebody that does that can do an introduction, follow them on Twitter and then get to know them a little bit and then DM them. The point is, is that start moving forward, have conversations, get to know them, find out what's going on in the roadmap. If your product, your service, your thing might be of interest or might help their future, if so, hey, make the offer of being acquired by them. This is not one or two conversations. This is not three or four people. This is literally reaching out to 20 people, 20 organizations. You need to put in the reps. You need to increase your numbers p your number so that you can have more options. You might look at listing your site at a place like Flippa.com or Microacquire.com that sells small businesses or Empire Flippers is another one. But every day moving forward, you need to do something that is going to get you closer to that end result. Because if you don't have that momentum if you don't have those steps moving forward, you're going to start to feel deflated. You're going to start to realize, wow, there is no progress. I'm still in the same place. Well, there will be progress in if you're moving towards your end decision, your end goal. Lastly, as you're getting through these steps and you're getting closer and closer to your end result, my advice to you is during this period, journal every day, even if it's just one or two minutes where you're just writing down how it went, why you just want to document this process? Because believe it or not, like I mentioned, you might find yourself in this situation again where you need to do the same thing again with another business or another venture. Or you might come across somebody or somebody might ask you, hey, how do I solve this problem? And you can go through the steps that you went through to solve it and help them out. That's what I did. And that's how I have today's lesson that wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening to the Hunter MBA show. Thank you, Mandy, for asking today's Q and A, Wednesday's question. If you got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at Omar MBA Net. If you love the show, make sure you share it on social. Let people know that you love the podcast that you listen to the $100 NBA show. Give them the link100mba.net so they could subscribe them on their favorite podcast app. Thanks so much in advance for doing that and helping grow the show. To wrap up today's lesson, one more piece of advice on this topic. If you're in this situation, I highly recommend you step away from the business for a period of time. A week, two weeks, three weeks. Sometimes you only need, and I know you might say, I can't do that. The business won't run. Things will collapse.

Try it.

Imagine you got hit by a bus. Okay, what would you do? Probably everything would be okay. Probably whatever is going on, it could wait a week, at least a week for you to come back and solve it. You need distance sometimes to see things clearly and to go through these thought experiments and think objectively about your options. Hopefully you can step away from the business for an extended period of time so that you can have a fresh perspective. Try to step away from your home, even if it's just a local trip, camping, something, anything that gets you out of your space and gets you into a new environment. This will help you think a little bit laterally. Think a little bit differently about your situation. Get a fresh perspective on things. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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