Ways to Make Your Business Scalable or Salable
(Even if you never do either)
De-center yourself. Even if you are still executing the deliverable yourself, make sure you are selling an outcome rather than access to you. This outcome should be presented as an experience, and anyone with the right skill set could be inserted into that offer to produce the result. This means if you scale, multiple people can be offer this experience, and if you sell, your business is an asset with or without you.
Market the outcome and the experience, not yourself. If the only way someone will sign up is if they get access to you specifically, you can’t hire people nor can you sell (without becoming an employee of the buyer). Make sure that potential clients are bonding with the company and the mission, rather than you as an individual, so that your business can live on without you.
Build a team that is amazing— and doesn’t rely on any one person. If you are going to scale and hire, over time people are going to opt out for any number of reasons. If your business takes a major hit every time someone leaves, that’s a huge problem. Instead, ensure that someone can leave and your clients won’t feel a huge change in the deliverable. If you are going to sell your business, a buyer will want to see that the company operates smoothly even if someone leaves or is out sick, otherwise they won’t have confidence the business will survive the transition.
Your systems should be clear and written down. If the only way payroll gets done is if Sally from bookkeeping is in the office, that’s a problem. If the only way a sale is make is if Andrew from marketing is there to execute the contract, that’s a problem. Make sure that you have a document that someone could consult to operate every corner of the business. That way you can hire more people and train them efficiently to scale, or a buyer can quickly understand the ins and outs of how high functioning your company is.
Make sure your company is compliant with all state and federal laws. Yeah, this isn’t sexy, but if you don’t do it you are not prepared to add employees, and no one is going to want to touch your business in a sale. This is definitely going to cost you time and money and it will feel like a huge investment, but it’s a sunk cost. Once you’ve done it you will recuperate those costs exponentially as you grow or sell.
The founder should not be the sales team. This is the last thing founders want to give away because we are all convinced only we can explain their business in a compelling way. But if you are still stuck in that mindset, you will never grow beyond yourself. Even if you want to be the deliverable forever, make sure someone else could sell the service if you can’t, or just don’t want to. If you are the sales team you will be limited in how far you can scale simply by the limits of time and space, and no one wants to buy a company from a founder if there is no proof of concept that someone else can convert clients.
Create a BOMB leadership, management and operations team. Frankly, these people should be better than you. If you want to scale your business, you will need these teams to be so on point that division of labor feels so easy. This will allow you to have new ideas and keep your company in a place of growth, while still operating super smoothly. If you want to sell your company, the first thing the buyer should notice is that they are purchasing a team that is incredibly confident and competent, that will not require handholding to continue producing revenue through the transition of ownership.
