A successful angel investor friend explained to me the concept of exit strategy like this:
To achieve a successful exit, it helps to view your business as a product. A good business person empathises with their customer and understands their reasons for buying your product. You know what need your product fulfils in the market and who will want to buy it. You use your expertise and experience to create the best possible product to meet this need. You build a relationship with potential customers with a view to making sales.
Now, step back and look at your business as a product. Why would someone want to buy your business in the future? Which companies could take your business and create more value with it? What needs do they have that your business could fulfil? How could you build your business to make it easy for them to acquire and integrate it with theirs? This is your market and selling proposition. And just as it takes time to build a customer base for your product, it takes time to build a relationship with your potential buyer. So start now.
Excerpt from Liber8 your Business: The revolutinary business planning technique that will set every business owner free
Here’s to a successful exit!
This was one of the slides at my talk to the Bubbles & Inspiration audience last night. My point being that sometimes to get ahead in life you have to ask for things, even if it seems far too bold an ask. My example was when I was a secretary in an advertising agency in London I asked the Managing Director if he would pay for me to go on a creative writing course. It was a huge agency and he was a busy man. I knew I had no chance of this happening. But I asked anyway. And he said yes! Who would have thought? If I had not asked, I wonder where I would be today. On a different path for sure. So just ask. The worse that could happen is someone will say no.
I was up at the crack of dawn to work on my book again this morning. The chapter I’m working on is called “Driving value through your brand” and I find myself studying the great brands of our time to demonstrate some of the points I’m making. You can’t really write a chapter on branding without looking at Apple. And you can’t look at the Apple brand without thinking about the core driver of this brand.
I stumbled across this blog by Marcus Sheridan whilst exploring tips for blogging… thought I’d share it with you. Here’s the link:
There’s nothing as satisfying in life as the achievement of a goal (Except perhaps a nice cold glass of rose on a summer’s day!). Seriously… making progress in life, regardless of what you are trying to achieve, is made all the more meaningful if you are achieving what you set out to achieve. But I can tell you from my own experience that having other people to hold you accountable to your goals and then being there to celebrate with you when you achieve them… this makes all the difference.
I thoroughly enjoyed having coffee with Glenn Baker, editor of NZBusiness Magazine yesterday. We shared lots of business ideas and thoughts about how we can work together to help small businesses succeed. Glenn gave me a tip to share and as obvious as it is, you always need to look deep in your heart and ask yourself how well you are doing this:
Just some numbers to think about. What is your margin? And how many/how much do you need to sell for your business to truly make great profit for you after normalised expenses? What’s the population of New Zealand? And what % of the population might want your product? Are you going to make it happen here? Just saying. For those of you who are creating businesses for NZ only. Most cities in the world have larger populations that our entire Country. Again… just saying….
I’ll keep the tips even more simple today. Facebook’s mission is ‘to make the world more open and connected’… what’s yours?