How to Exit YOUR Business on YOUR Terms

The first question has to be ‘why have an exit plan at all’? 

Why should we all have an exit plan, why would we leave and when should we make one?

It’s fair to say that not many of us when we start up our businesses think straight away about our exit – but ideally we should.

And There are a various reasons why we should have an exit plan - essentially they come down to being in control and having options.  There are a number of ways to exit a business and a number of reasons why we might want to or need to exit.  

We've explored many of the reasons why we may want or end up leaving our business.

So what about timing and when should we start planning?

In this lecture we are going to take a look at the alternative ways of exiting

If we want to exit, what kind of exits are there?

In this lecture we take a look at the 7 most likely types of potential suitors.

How much is your business worth and why do some business seem to sell for more than you would expect and others sell for less?!

Whilst it is not the purpose of this course to look in detail at how to value a business, we can’t leave the question of “how much” without looking at the different ways to value a business.  After all, any external party is going to do their own valuation so how will they go about it?

How can we influence the amount and drive up the value?

So what if we want to increase the value of our business and maximise the chances of someone being interested? – that’s what we’ll look at next

As we’ve already said, some business will sell for more than their financial valuation and therefore more than the typical multiple – maybe several times as much.  So how can we help to influence that in the way we build our business?

You’ll be glad to know that you can influence it – but not overnight.  You need to adopt certain principles in the way you build your business 

We should now have a reasonable understanding of why we need to plan our exit, who are our likely investors and why they might be interested in you, how will they go about deciding how much you are worth and an understanding of how you can influence that amount before you go to market. 

With all of that that in mind, now is a good time to build your investment story/ elevator pitch.  

Once you have all this it then comes down to how you want to manage your exit process and release your equity. 

At the end of the day – money will be the key consideration in a sale – or transfer

So let’s take a look at the different types of money – or the different ways to get your money out. Not surprisingly they link with the previous tutorial on the different ways of exiting

When you put all of this together you will have the core elements of a robust exit strategy – so as a final call to action pull together your previous activities/ answers in the following outline format – there is a word template document as a downloadable resource to help you:

Most of us running our own businesses are by nature self-starters and the kind of people who by an large figure things out for ourselves – and we are rightly cautious about paying for professionals if we think we can do it ourselves.

So who do we need and how much will they cost?!

A question that most business owners considering an exit ask is

When should I tell my staff?

The first thing is that is Not just staff