After building your business for years you want to maximize the value you get from exiting your business, while ensuring that you keep the rewards you have earned. Here are my suggestions on Exit Strategy from my book Wind In Your Sails.

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Transcript of Exit Strategy

Hi I am Coach David J. Greer and today I want to talk to you about exit strategy. If you make your company profitable and make money every year taking some of those profits for yourself, then you make the maximum number of opportunities for you to exit. It means you never have to be in a rush to exit.

Selling your company is a process like any other selling process. It will take a lot of your time and energy to execute on that process. You need to find those right strategic buyers who will give you the most money for your company.

That process will take one, two, or three years. You need to be able to build a plan and show how you can execute on that plan because buyers pay more when they are confident that the company is going to create the results that you promised.

One of the things that was hard for me to understand was that buyers are interested in buying your business without you being there. A lot of your business value today likely comes from your energy, drive, and ideas. You need to be able to show a prospective buyer how the company will operate even if you are not there.

My long-time accountant told me when I sold out of one of my businesses that even though it had been really challenging and difficult to build that business and to sell out of it, that was nothing to keeping the rewards. I’ve learned that good financial advice and a conservative approach to keeping those rewards is very different than what it took, and the risks  that I was prepared to take, in building a business.

In my book Wind In Your Sails, I show how an exit strategy can maximize the value that you get for your business while letting you keep the rewards.