Maximise the Value of your Business for a Successful Exit

The research tells us that most don’t have a strategy around how to do this and therefore often fail to either maximise or extract the value, or both.

Maximise the value of your business for a successful exit

Most business owners go into business planning to maximise the value of the business and extract that value (most often by selling) when they exit. But the research tells us that most don’t have a plan or strategy around how to do this and therefore often fail to either maximise or extract the value, or both.

The most recent (June 2013) MGI Australian Family and Private Business survey highlights several key statistics in relation to business owners looking at an exit:

Ownership
  • 60–69 age bracket – 37%, up from 21% in 2010 (average age now 58)
Business objectives
  • accumulate wealth – 55%
  • pass onto next generation – 21%
  • employ family members – 9%

34% do not have an adequately funded retirement plan (up from 17% in 2006)

Sale of business
  • would seriously consider selling if approached – 64% of family businesses(25% have been approached in the last 12 months), 79% of nonfamily businesses
  • plan to sell (now or later): 44% of family businesses, 75% of nonfamily businesses)
Of those that plan to sell
  • wish to retire – 32%
  • have concerns for the future – 25%
  • lack of family successor – 21%
  • original intention – 10%
  • sale price exceeds expectations (down from 20 in 2003 and 17 in 2006) – 6%
Issues & challenges
  • letting go of leadership and control – 37%
  • securing adequate capital for growth and retirement – 36%
  • providing liquidity for family owners to exit – 33%
  • choosing a suitable ownership structure for the next generation – 33%
Succession
  • NOT agreed on a proposed succession plan – 75%
  • relying on sale of business for cash to fund retirement – 33%

Craig West, CEO, Succession Plus

How To Thrive As A ‘Middleman’

middlemanBeing a middleman (or woman) has become risky business.

When was the last time you used a travel agent? Agencies have largely become irrelevant given the rise of online travel booking companies. How about a record/CD store? iTunes and online music subscription services have gotten rid of the middleman between you and your music. Think back to the last time you rented a movie – did you get in your car to visit the local movie rental store?

Travel agents, record/CD stores and movie rental businesses have all fallen victim to the curse of the middleman.  When all you do is move other people’s product, the only value you have is your location.  But in a world where content can be streamed and containers can be shipped overnight, being the local guy or gal is becoming irrelevant. Even if you have a protected geographic territory, near perfect pricing information available to your customers through the Internet will eventually grind down your margins.

Dragging down your value

Not only do you risk losing sales and margin to online competitors; being a middleman drags down the value of your company.

We have access to a tool that measures your business along eight dimensions that drive the value of your business. One factor is called The Switzerland Structure, which measures your reliance on any one customer, employee or supplier.

If you’re reliant on a single supplier to provide the goods you resell, you could be in trouble. Having one or two suppliers means you could be at risk of an industry change (like the one that hit record stores a few years ago) or at risk of your supplier choosing to build his own sales force and start competing directly with you.

Henry Schein: a valuable middleman

If you’re a middleman, the solution is to rethink the value you provide your customers. Instead of assuming it is your location that counts, consider yourself a curator of great products for your customers. Your job is no longer to be the local guy or gal but to be the person who sifts through all the noise, tests and evaluates what’s available, and supplies just the very best for customers who value – and are willing to pay for – your services as a curator.

Take, for example, the case of Henry Schein, Inc., a FORTUNE 500 company and a member of the NASDAQ 100 Index. Henry Schein is the world’s largest provider of health care products and services to medical, dental, and veterinary office-based practitioners – including in Australia. The company is one of Fortune Magazine’s “World’s Most Admired Companies” and all it does is hawk other people’s stuff.

The difference is that they see their job as sifting through all of the suppliers who want to provide products to dentists (or doctors, vets, etc.) and picking only the very best to recommend to their clients. They are the uber gatekeepers.

Dentists would prefer to spend their time billing patients rather than meeting with suppliers, so they value the role Henry Schein plays in helping them minimise the number of sales people they need to see.

Dentists’ loyalty to Henry Schein means that if a supplier wants to sell to dentists, they need to go through Henry Schein. The balance of power has been turned on its head because customers would prefer to buy from Henry Schein rather than directly from the end supplier. And that’s the acid test of any middleman: given the choice, would your customers rather buy from you or go direct?

If you’re curious to see how your business would perform on The Switzerland Structure and the other seven drivers of the value of your company, take the Value Builder Score now!

 

Justification for Your Next Vacation

A recent survey by The Sellability Score found companies that would perform well without their owner for a period of three months are 50 percent more likely to get an offer to be acquired when compared to more owner-dependent businesses.

There is no better justification for taking a blissful, uninterrupted holiday than to see how your company performs in your absence. The better your company runs on autopilot, the more valuable it will be when you’re ready to sell.

To gauge your company’s ability to handle your absence, start by taking a vacation. Leave your computer at home and switch off your mobile. Upon your return, you’ll probably discover that your employees got resourceful and found answers to a lot of the questions they would have asked you if you had been just down the hall. That’s a good thing and a sign you should start planning an even longer vacation.

You’ll also likely come back to an inbox full of issues that need your personal attention. Instead of busily finding answers to each problem in a frenzied attempt to clean up your inbox, slow down and look at each issue through the lens of a possible problem with your people, systems or authorisations.

PeopleVacation
Start with your people and answer the following questions:

  • Why did this problem end up on my desk?
  • Who else is qualified to answer this question and why was that person not consulted?
  • If nobody else is qualified, who can be trained to answer this question in the future?

Systems
Next, look at your systems and procedures. Could the issue have been dealt with if you had a system or a set of rules in place? The best systems are hardwired and do not require human interpretation; but if you’re not able to lock down a technical fix, then at least give employees a set of rules to follow in the future.

Authorisations
You may be a bottleneck in your own company if you’re trying to control spending too much. Employees may know what to do but do not have any means of paying for the fix they know you would want.

For example, you could put a customer service rule in place that gives your front line staff the authority to make a customer happy in any way they see fit provided it could be done for under $100.

You might allow an employee to spend a specific amount with a specific supplier each month without coming to you first.  Or you might give an employee an annual budget, an amount they can spend without seeking your approval.

Given the fires that may need to be extinguished after the fact, taking a holiday may seem more of a hassle than it’s worth. But if you transform the aftermath of a vacation into systems and training that allow employees to act on their own, you’ll find the vacation is worth what you paid for it many times over: your company will increase in value as it becomes less dependent on you personally.

Do You Have a Billion Dollar Business Hiding Inside You Company?

1-billion-dollarsAsking customers to pay to join a special group of your best patrons can increase your revenue, encourage customers to buy new product and services from you, and provide a healthy boost to your cash flow. Just ask Jeff Bezos, the founder of U.S.-based Amazon.com and the chief architect behind Amazon Prime. In exchange for $79 a year, Amazon Prime customers get:

  • Free two-day shipping on millions of items
  • Unlimited streaming videos and TV shows
  • 350,000 books to borrow for free.

It’s a compelling offer, which is why, according to TIME Magazine, more than 10 million people have signed up. If you do the math, that makes Prime close to a billion-dollar business for Amazon. And like most programs, members pay upfront, giving Amazon a big injection of positive cash flow.

But what is even more interesting is what being a member of Prime does to the buying behaviour of the average Amazon customer. Prime customers pay their $79 upfront and therefore are eager to ‘get their money back’ by purchasing a bigger and broader array of products from Amazon. With free shipping and a $79 nut to recover, Prime customers go well beyond buying books from Amazon and now get everything from tires to turtlenecks from the e-tailer. According to TIME, the average Prime customer now spends $1,224 per year with Amazon vs. the average non-Prime customer who spends just $505. In other words, Prime customers spend almost three times more per year than non-members.

Most businesses have some sort of loyalty program (buy nine sandwiches and the tenth is on us or get five hairs cuts and the sixth is free). The difference with Amazon Prime is they are charging customers to sign up for their special club and the fact that customers pay to join changes their buying behaviour to want to recover their membership fee.

Amazon did not invent the pay-to-join-our-club business model. Private members clubs have been doing it for years. To join an elite golf club, you pay an initiation fee of tens of thousands of dollars, which then acts as a barrier to ever leaving. But as with Amazon Prime customers, becoming a member also changes a member’s buying behaviour regarding other items. When compared to someone shooting 18 holes at a public course, the average golf club member is much more likely to buy balls from the shop, lessons from the pro, and dinner from the dining room.

The “AMC Stubs” loyalty program charges moviegoers to join the club. In return, customers get free upgrades on the size of popcorn and drink orders, along with $10 of Stubs rewards to spend on anything in the theatre in return for every $100 spent. AMC’s best customers become even better customers by going to the movies even more often and filling up with goodies while they’re there.

Look at the spending patterns of people who pay a premium to join a credit card company’s loyalty program. Customers who pay upfront for a premium card charge a much broader and deeper set of services to their card than people using a freebie card.

Getting your customers to pay to join your elite customer club requires that you design a compelling offer as Amazon Prime and AMC Stubs have done. But if you build it right, not only will the club itself turn a profit; it will also provide a quick boost to your cash flow and create a legion of sticky customers who buy more because they paid to become a member.

The hidden goal of the smartest business owners

What are your business goals for the year? If you’re like most owners, you have a profit goal you want to hit. You may also have a top line revenue number that’s important to you. While those goals are important, there is another objective that may have an even bigger payoff: building a sellable business.goals

But what if you don’t want to sell? That’s irrelevant. Here are five reasons why building a sellable business should be your most important goal, regardless of when you plan to push the eject button:

  1. Sellability means freedom
    One of the fundamental tenants of sellability is how well your company would perform if you were unable to work for a while. As long as your business is dependent on you personally, there’s not much to sell. Making your company less dependent on you by building a management team and creating just-add-water systems for employees to follow means you have the ability to spend time away from your business. Think of the world of possibilities that would open up if you could choose not to go into the office tomorrow….
  2. Sellable businesses are more fun
    Running a business would be fun if you were able to spend your days on strategic thinking and big picture ideas. Instead, most business owners spend the majority of their day on the minutia: the government forms, the employee performance reviews, bank reconciliations, customer issues, auditing expenses. The boring details of company ownership suck the enjoyment out of owning a business—and it is exactly these tasks you need to get into someone else’s job description if you’re ever going to sell.
  3. Sellability is financial freedom
    Each month you open your brokerage statement to see how your portfolio is doing. Not because you want to sell your portfolio, but because you want to know where you stand on the journey to financial freedom. Creating a sellable business also allows you peace of mind, knowing that you’re building something that—just like your stock portfolio—has value you could choose to make liquid one day.
  4. Sellability is a gift
    Imagine that your first-born graduates from college and as a gift you give him your prized 1971 Holden Monaro GTS. Your heavily indebted child takes it on the road, but after a few kilometres, the engine starts smoking. The mechanic takes one look under the hood and declares that the engine needs a rebuild. You thought you were giving your child an incredible asset, but instead it’s an expensive liability he can’t afford to keep, and nor can he sell it without feeling guilty. You may be planning to pass your business on to your kids or let your young managers buy into your company over time. These are both admirable exit options, but if your business hasn’t been tuned up to run without you, you may be passing along a jalopy.
  5. Nine women can’t make a baby in one month
    There are some things in life that take time, no matter how much you want to rush them. Making your business sellable often requires significant changes; and a prospective buyer is going to want to see how your business has performed for the three years after you have made the changes required to make your business sellable. Therefore, if you want to sell in five years, you need to start making your business sellable now so the changes have time to gestate.

Are you curious about how sellable your company is and what you would need to tweak to sell it when you’re ready? Then it’s time to get your Sellability Score via the questionnaire on our website. It takes about thirteen minutes and your responses are kept confidential. You can complete the questionnaire here : https://www.businesscompanion.com.au/sellability-score/