Some one that is look­ing to buy a busi­ness most likely falls in one of three camps.

1. Strate­gic Buyer: They want your brand and that’s all (not your peo­ple or facilities)
2. Replace­ment Buyer: They intend to sit in your seat and do what you did.
3. Invest­ment Buyer: They intend to hire a man­ager to run the busi­ness for them.

There are a vari­ety of ways to value your busi­ness (actu­ally this is deter­mined by how many peo­ple you talk to). But here are some fac­tors that will be on the mind of a buyer and that will impact how much your busi­ness is worth. In no par­tic­u­lar order (like most of my thoughts).

• Does the busi­ness run well when you go on vaca­tion? You do take vaca­tions right?
• Are you co-mingling your per­sonal money and the busi­ness finances?
• Do you have a diver­si­fied cus­tomer base?
• How easy is it to get into your type of business?
• Do you know what EBITDA is and what story it tells about your business?
• Do you have a small group (or even 1) of employ­ees with­out whom the busi­ness wouldn’t work?

Those are just a sam­ple of what you should be ask­ing your­self as you think about sell­ing your busi­ness. Here’s one final ques­tion to pon­der. If you had the amount of money that you want to sell your busi­ness for, would you see your busi­ness as a good investment?

The Gallup Orga­ni­za­tion has done a lot of great work over the years on employee engage­ment. My grand­fa­ther used to say “No need to re-invent the wheel”! As impor­tant as inno­va­tion is, how often do you real­ize you already know a solu­tion, model, approach, dis­ci­pline that will solve your prob­lem with out hav­ing to re-invent the wheel?! Just tak­ing the time to look at:

• Plan­ning and it’s Effectiveness
• Processes and their Efficiency
• Peo­ple and their Engagement

will give you a great win­dow into what you need to address in your busi­ness. Now the only ques­tion is “Do you have the courage to address the issues that you find”? I guess this is bad mar­ket­ing on my part. I should be telling you that I know a com­pletely rev­o­lu­tion­ary method­ol­ogy that is a total secret and that it will trans­form your busi­ness while you sleep. Sorry, Snake oil is not in my value propo­si­tion. Most likely your busi­ness is a reflec­tion of you as a person/leader and it’s going to take self inspec­tion, hon­estly, hard work, humil­ity and more to trans­form your busi­ness. That sounds hard doesn’t it? It is, but don’t you think it’s bet­ter than not trans­form­ing and not surviving.

With all of the doom and gloom being blared at us via the media I think it is worth while to real­ize that it’s often whats unseen that will harm us or our busi­ness most. Why is this impor­tant? Because we can rarely do much to change what we see on TV but we can very fre­quently change the things closer to home that can hurt us more. We just have to be open to the fact that we don’t know it all and lis­ten to oth­ers around us. This video illus­trates this point bet­ter than I can state it.