Business Blog
How Long Do You Want to Live?
Some owners focus on growing their profits, while others are obsessed with sales goals. Have you ever considered making it your primary goal to set up your business so that it can thrive and grow without you? A business not dependent on its owner is the ultimate asset to own. It allows you complete control over your time so that you can choose the projects you get involved in and the vacations you take. When it comes to getting out, a business independent of its owner is worth a lot more than an owner-dependent company. Here are five ways to set up your business so that it can succeed without you. 1. Give Them A Stake In The Outcome Jack Stack, the author of The Great Game of Business and A Stake In The Outcome wrote the book on creating an ownership culture inside your company: you are transparent about your financial results and you allow employees to participate in your financial success. This results in employees who act like owners when you’re not around. 2. Get Them To Walk In Your Shoes If you’re not quite comfortable opening up the books to your employees, consider a simple management technique where you respond to every question your staff bring you with the same answer, “If you owned the company, what would you do?” By forcing your employees to walk in your shoes, you get them thinking about their question as you would and it builds the habit of starting to think like an owner. Pretty soon, employees are able to solve their own problems. 3. Vet Your Offerings Identify the products and services which require your personal involvement in either making, delivering or selling them. Make a list of everything you sell and score each on a scale of 0 to 10 on how easy they are to teach an employee to handle. Assign a 10 to offerings that are easy to teach employees and give a lower score to anything that requires your personal attention. Commit to stopping to sell the lowest scoring product or service on your list. Repeat this exercise every quarter. 4. Create Automatic Customers Are you the company’s best salesperson? If so, you’ll need to fire yourself as your company’s rainmaker in order to get it to run without you. One way to do this is to create a recurring revenue business model where customers buy from you automatically. Consider creating a service contract with your customers that offers to fulfill one of their ongoing needs on a regular basis. 5. Write An Instruction Manual For Your Business Finally, make sure your company comes with instructions included. Write an employee manual or what MBA-types called Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). These are a set of rules employees can follow for repetitive tasks in your company. This will ensure employees have a rulebook they can follow when you’re not around, and, when an employee leaves, you can quickly swap them out with a replacement to take on duties of the job. You-proofing your business has enormous benefits. It will allow you to create a company and have a life. Your business will be free to scale up because it is no longer dependent on you, its bottleneck. Best of all, it will be worth a lot more to a buyer whenever you are ready to sell.
If you’re a service provider, it can be difficult to separate the service from the provider.
The first 90 days of any new relationship are critical: A president has about three months to inspire the electorate and gain the political capital he needs to govern. A young team prospect has but a few months to impress his coach before being sent down to the minors. A new CEO has 90 days to learn her job before the rank and file start expecting tangible leadership. The Onboarding Window: The First 90 Days For a young company, the first 90 days of a customer relationship are equally important. Research into the subscription business model shows that getting a customer to effectively start using your product in the first 90 days leads to an increase in lifetime value of up to 300 percent for some companies. Take a look at marketing software provider Constant Contact, which used to struggle with the first 90 days of a new customer relationship. In the old days, Constant Contact took a "who, what, when" approach to onboarding new customers. Who stood for who a customer wanted to send an email campaign to; what stood for what the customer wanted to send; and when described the timing of the campaign. After users signed up for its service, Constant Contact would ask customers to upload their email database (the who in the three-step onboarding process). This required the new user to upload a customer list--which is the trickiest part of the onboarding experience. It required the customer to leave Constant Contact's site and struggle with how to export a contact list--often from a jury-rigged database kept in Excel or Outlook. The process was awkward, and many new customers stopped using Constant Contact because they hit a barrier before they had a chance to fall in love with the Constant Contact software. What, Who, When Wanting to stem new customer churn, Constant Contact changed its on boarding to focus first on the what. Immediately after signing up, new users were encouraged to create their first email campaign. Suddenly customers were seeing their campaign come to life in front of their eyes. Constant Contact offered customers a library of stock images that looked more beautiful than anything a business owner had used in the past. Customers could see firsthand how professional their company was going to look. Only after the customer had completed the what stage and earned the emotional reward of seeing its first campaign come to life, did Constant Contact switch to the who part of creating a campaign. The difference was, by this point, Constant Contact had enough relationship equity with the customer to get it over the hump of uploading its database. This minor reordering of the onboarding flow led to a dramatic reduction in customer churn--which is the death knell of any subscription business. Whether you’re in a subscription business, or still using a transaction business model, how you treat a customer in the first 90 days will go a long way in determining their overall satisfaction. To benchmark your customer satisfaction against world class brands, get your Value Builder Score now. https://score.valuebuildersystem.com/quantum-dimensions-empowerment/ronald-brough
Sometimes they run out of potential customers to sell to or their product starts losing market share to a competitor, but there is often a more fundamental reason: the founder(s) lose the stomach for it. When you start a business, the assets you have outside of your business likely exceed those you have in it, because in the early days, your business is worthless. As your company grows, it starts to have value and becomes a more significant part of your wealth—especially if you’re pouring your profits back into funding your growth. For most business owners, their company is their largest asset. Eventually, your business may become such a large proportion of your wealth that you realize you are taking a giant risk every day that you decide to hold on to it just a little bit longer. 95% Of His Wealth In One Business In 2000, Etienne Borgeat and Olivier Letard co-founded PCO innovation, an IT consulting firm. The company took off and, by 2016, PCO had 600 full-time employees and offices around the world. As the business grew, Borgeat and Letard started to become uneasy about how much of their wealth was tied up in their business. By 2015, the shares Borgeat held in PCO represented 95% of his wealth. That’s about the point that aerospace giant Boeing came calling. Boeing wanted PCO to take on a very large project and Borgeat and Letard turned down the opportunity reasoning that the project was so large it could risk their entire company if it went wrong. In the early days, the partners would never have turned down a chance to work with Boeing, but the partners had changed. That’s when Borgeat and Letard realized the time had come to sell. They agreed to an acquisition offer from Accenture of over one times revenue. The success of your startup is probably driven by your willingness to put all your eggs in one basket. You’re all in. However, at some point, you may find yourself starting to play it safe, which is about the time your business may be better off in someone else’s hands.
When you strip away the layers, it all comes down to darts. Imagine a dart board with a bull’s eye and around it is a series of wider and wider circles. The bull’s eye is where the people just like you hang out. They are the people (or businesses) who feel the problem your company set out to solve. They are usually your first customers and raving fans. The further you go outside of your bull’s eye, the less these prospects feel your exact pain. Why do entrepreneurs go outside their bull’s eye? When you’re a self-funded start-up, you’re scrambling — just trying to bootstrap your way to a company. You don’t have a lot of money to invest in formal marketing, so you rely on word-of-mouth and referrals, which also means you’re often talking to people outside of your bull’s eye. These prospects may experience the problem you’re trying to solve, but they are slightly different (that’s why they’re not in the bull’s eye). They like your product or service but want a little tweak to it: a customization or a different version. You don’t see the harm in making a change and start to adjust your offering to accommodate the customers outside your bull’s eye. Your new (slightly-outside-the-bull’s-eye) customer tells her friends about how great you are, and how willing you are to listen to your customers, and she refers a prospect even further outside your bull’s eye who again, asks you for another tweak. Making these changes to your original product or service to accommodate customers outside your bull’s eye seems innocent enough at the time, but eventually, it undermines your growth. Why? To grow a business beyond your efforts, you need to hire employees (or build technology) that can do the work. As humans, we are usually lousy at doing something for the first time, but can master most things with enough repetition. Think about teaching a toddler how to tie his shoes. The first few attempts are usually rough. It’s a new skill and their tiny hands have never had to make bunny ears before. You break it down for the child and show them how to master each step. It can take weeks, but eventually they get it. As adults, we don’t even think about tying our shoes — we’ve mastered the skill by repetition. The same is true of your employees. They need time to truly master the delivery or your product or service. Every time you make a tweak for a new customer outside your bull’s eye, it’s like changing the instructions on tying your shoe laces. It’s disorienting for everyone and leads to substandard products and services, which customers receive and are less than enthusiastic about. Having unhappy customers often leads the owner to step in and “fix” the problem. While some founders can indeed create the customized product or service for their new, outside-the-bull’s-eye customer, they are making their company reliant on them in the process. A business reliant on its founder will stall out at a handful of employees when the founder runs out of hours in the day. The secret to avoiding this plateau, and continuing to grow, is to be brutally disciplined in only serving customers in your bull’s eye for much longer than it feels natural. When you want to grow, the temptation is take whatever revenue you can, but the kind of growth that comes from serving customers outside your bull’s eye can be a dead end.
You can now buy a subscription for everything from dog treats to razor blades. Music subscription services are booming as our appetite to buy tracks is replaced by our willingness to rent access to them. Starbucks now even offers coffee on subscription. Why are so many companies leveraging the subscription business model? The obvious reason is that recurring revenue boosts your company’s value, but there are some hidden benefits to augmenting your business with a subscription offering. Free Market Research Finding out what your customers want is expensive. By the time you pay attendees, rent a room with a one-way mirror and buy the little sandwiches with the crusts cut off, a focus group can cost you upwards of $6,000. A statistically significant piece of quantitative research, done by a reputable polling company, might approach six figures. With a subscription company, you get instant market research for free. Netflix knows which shows to produce based on the viewing behaviour of its subscribers. No need to ask viewers what they like, Netflix can see what they watch and rate. For you, a subscription offering can allow you to test new ideas and gives you a direct relationship with your customers so you can see what they like first hand. Cash Flow Subscription companies are often criticized for being hungry for cash. Many charge by the month and then have to wait months—sometimes years—to recover the costs of winning a subscriber. That assumes, however, that you’re charging for your subscription by the month. If you’re selling your subscription to businesses, you may get away with charging for a year’s worth of your subscription up front. That’s what the analyst firm Gartner does, and it means they get an entire year’s worth of cash from their subscriber on day one. Costco charges its annual membership up front, which means it has billions of dollars of subscription revenue to float its retail operations. Loyalty Customers can be promiscuous. You may have a perfectly satisfied customer but if they see an offer from one of your competitors, they might jump ship to save a few bucks. However, if you lock your customers into a subscription, they may be less tempted to try a competitor since they have already made an investment with you. One of the reasons Amazon Prime is so profitable is that Prime subscribers buy more and are stickier than non-Prime subscribers. Prime subscribers want to get their money’s worth, so they buy a wider swath of products from Amazon and are less tempted by competitive offers. The obvious reason to launch a subscription offering of your own is that the predictable recurring revenue will boost the value of your company. And while that’s certainly true, the hidden benefits may even be more important.
If the pandemic has forced you back into the weeds of your business, you’re not alone. Many owners are again doing tasks they haven’t done in years because they have had to lay off front-line staff or their employees have fallen ill or are caring for someone in need. Being back in the middle of things is neither healthy for you nor your business long term. Personally, it’s a recipe for burnout, and professionally, your business will be less valuable with you doing all the work. Now is an excellent opportunity to retool your company so that it can start running without you again. These three steps should help: Step 1: Sell less stuff to more people Most companies become too dependent on their owner because they offer too many products and services. With such a full breadth of offerings, it’s hard to find and train employees that can deliver. The secret is to pick something that makes you unique and focus on finding more customers, not more things to sell. Take Gabriela Isturiz as an example. She cofounded Bellefield Systems, a company offering a timekeeping application for lawyers. Over the next seven years, Bellefield grew to 45 employees. Although many businesses bill by the hour, Isturiz focused exclusively on timekeeping for lawyers, which is one of the reasons she was able to integrate with 32 practice management platforms used by lawyers—a big reason Bellefield's product was so sticky. It worked out well for Isturiz as she was growing 50% a year with EBITDA margins of more than 25% when she sold her company in 2019. Step 2: Systemize it Next, focus on creating systems and procedures for employees to follow. For example, Nashville-based Bryan Clayton built Peachtree, a landscaping business. Most lawn care companies are mom-and-pop operations, but Clayton built Peachtree up to 150 employees before he sold it to LUSA for a seven-figure windfall. What made Peachtree so unique? Clayton focused on documenting his processes. For example, one of his customers was a McDonald’s franchisee who owned 40 locations. He was frustrated by how many people discarded cigarette butts in his drive-through, so Clayton offered to clear the debris from the lanes as part of his lawn care process. He then trained his employees on the drive-through clean-up process he had created so it was followed across all 40 of the customer’s locations. Step 3: Outsource it Next, consider outsourcing what you’re not very good at. For example, David Lekach started Dream Water, a natural sleep aid bottled in a five-ounce shot similar to the famous 5-Hour Energy Drink. Lekach built Dream Water to almost $10 million in annual revenue before selling it to Harvest One, a cannabis company, for $34.5 million in cash and Harvest One stock. Lekach saw his role as “selling Dream Water, not making it.” That meant he outsourced the manufacturing, packaging, and distribution of Dream Water to a co-packer, ensuring Lekach and his team could focus on selling Dream Water. It’s natural for a leader to step in during a crisis, but that’s not sustainable for the long term. Pull yourself out of the doing, and you’ll build a valuable company for the long term that’s a lot less stressful to run along the way.
If you’re like most owners, you aspire to have the freedom that comes from owning your own business: The freedom to decide how you spend your time The freedom to choose whom to work with and to avoid people who drain your energy The freedom to make as much money as you deserve This desire for freedom often leads owners to aspire for a bigger business, which they think will give them what they want. Unfortunately, most owners who strive for more revenue or profit as their primary goal often have: Less time because it’s spent managing an ever-expanding set of offerings. Less freedom because complexity inevitably leads to conflict. Less money because any available cash is reinvested in growth. So, in many ways, growing a larger business gets you further from your ultimate goal of freedom. Instead of thinking of your business as something to push harder and faster, there’s an alternative that may get you closer to what you want. Think of your business as a child, and your role is to guide her into becoming an independent, thriving adult. If your goal is to create a business that can thrive without you, you will start to make different decisions. That demanding customer who wants your attention on their project no longer looks so attractive. That exciting new product that’s going to require you to sell no longer looks worth it. By focusing on the role of parent rather than business driver, the demands on your time lessen as your employees pick up more of the load. You may also find your business selling more as you build a team of salespeople rather than relying only on yourself to drive the top line. The ultimate irony is that your business may end up being more valuable than a larger peer where the owner is still mostly responsible for sales. Acquirers want businesses that will survive the loss of their owner. In many cases, they will pay a premium for companies where the owner is in the background. Consider the case of Damian James, who sold his network of mobile podiatry clinics generating $11 million in revenue for $13.2 million. He credits much of the sale to the fact that he was no longer running the businesses day to day and had reduced his time commitment to just one or two days per week. David Hauser started Grasshopper, an Internet-based phone system he built to $30 million in annual revenue before he sold it to Citrix for $165 million in cash and $8.6 million in stock. Hauser was down to working just one day per week at the time of the sale of his company. Growing revenue and profits will be valuable to an acquirer, but if you make them your only goal, you may find yourself with less of what you want. Treat your business like a child who needs guidance to become a thriving adult, and revenue, profits, and ultimate value will come as a by-product.
Have you ever wondered what determines the value of your business? Perhaps you’ve heard an industry rule of thumb and assumed that your company will be worth about the same as a similar size company in your industry. However, when we take a look at the data provided by The Value Builder System™, we’ve found there are eight factors that drive the value of your business, and they are all potentially more important than the industry you’re in. Not convinced? Let’s look at Jill Nelson, who recently sold a majority interest in her $11 million telephone answering service, Ruby Receptionists, for $38.8 million. That’s a lot of money for answering the phone on behalf of independent lawyers, contractors and plumbers across America. To give you a sense of how high that valuation is, let’s look at some comparison data. At Value Builder, we’ve worked with more than 30,000 businesses in the last five years. Our clients start by completing their Value Builder questionnaire, which covers 35 questions that allow us to place an estimate of value on a company. The average value for companies starting with us is 3.6 times pre-tax profit and those who graduate our program with a Value Builder Score of 80+ (out of a possible 100) are getting an average of 6.3 times pre-tax profit. When we isolate the administrative support industry that Ruby Receptionists operates in, the average multiple offered for these companies over the last five years is just 1.8 times pre-tax profit. Nelson, by contrast, sold the majority interest in Ruby Receptionists for more than 3 times revenue. There were three factors that made Nelson’s business much more valuable than her industry peers, and they are the same things you can focus on to drive up the value of your company: 1. Cultivate Your Point Of Differentiation Acquirers do not buy what they could easily build themselves. If your main competitive advantage is price, an acquirer will rightly conclude they can simply set up shop as a competitor and win most of your price sensitive customers away by offering a temporary discount. In the case of Ruby Receptionists, Nelson invested heavily in a technology that ensured that no matter when a client received a phone call, her technology would route that call to an available receptionist. Nelson’s competitors were mostly low-tech mom and pop businesses who often missed calls when there was a sudden surge of callers. Nelson’s technology could handle client surges because of the unique routing technology she had built that transferred calls efficiently across her network of receptionists. Nelson’s acquirer, a private equity company called Updata Partners, saw the potential of applying Nelson’s call-routing technology to other businesses they owned and were considering investing in. 2. Recurring Revenue Acquirers want to know how your business will perform after they buy it. Nothing gives them more confidence that your business will continue to thrive post sale than recurring revenue from subscriptions or service contracts. In Nelson’s case, Ruby Receptionists billed its customers through recurring contracts—perfect for making a buyer confident that her company has staying power. 3. Customer Diversification In addition to having customers pay on recurring contracts, the most valuable businesses have lots of little customers rather than one or two biggies. Most acquirers will balk if any one of your customers represents more than 15% of your revenue. At the time of the acquisition, Ruby Receptionists had 6,000 customers paying an average of just a few hundred dollars per month. Nelson could lose a client or two each month without skipping a beat, which is ideal for reassuring a hesitant buyer that your company’s revenue stream is bulletproof. Nelson built a valuable company in a relatively unexciting, low-tech industry, proving that how you run your business is more important than the industry you’re in.