Are you ready to sell your business and is your business ready to be sold?

I am going to stick my neck out here and say no – to both questions. You are not ready to sell your business and as a result, it is not ready for sale.

You are not ready to sell your business because you aren’t ready to retire, you don’t want to retire, you don’t know what to do if you were to retire and let’s face it, you like what you do.

Building your business gives your life purpose and (for the most part) it is fun to build. Because you are not finished building it, plus the fact you aren’t sure what you would do if you did sell it means that it is not ready to be sold.

Daniel H. Pink says in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, that the secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

As a self-employed entrepreneur I love directing my own life, learning new things and having purpose to my life. I am not ready to sell my business either but, just like most business owners I recognise the need to have a backup plan – “Plan B” – in writing.

Plan B is the “what if something happens” plan. What if you got an offer you couldn’t refuse, what if you couldn’t run the business any more, is the business ready to change ownership?

 

Yogi Bera the coach of the New York Yankees said that baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical. Business ownership is much the same except the other half is financial. Running your business like it’s always for sale is what Plan B is all about.

Most business owners have Plan B, but it’s in their heads. What we do is help owners find the time to get what’s in their heads down on paper, identify problems they didn’t know that had and solve them before they explode.

Are you ready to put Plan B in writing? You should be, it’s prudent, it’s necessary, it builds value and it is good business.