built-to-sell.md
Interesting story of a fictional personal selling his business. Interesting ideas on what needs to be done if you want to sell your business which includes: making it a product rather than a service (if it's a service, you'll have to work together for 3 years), disassociating yourself from the business, etc.
Implementation guide:
- #1: isolate a service or product that can scale
- scalable things follow these criteria: (i) teachable to employees / delivered through tech, (ii) valuable to customers, (iii) repeatable (the same customers keep coming back to buy again)
- teachable + valuable + repetable
- don't do request for proposal (RFPs), it takes too much time and effort. instead offer one of a kind service.
- #2: create a positive cash flow cycle
- charge your customer in full or part for your product, before you pay the cost of whatever you provide.
- #3: hire a sales team
- you can't sell if you're doing the sales.
- hire people to do sales, you focus on selling the company.
- get sales people who sell products, not services.
- #4: stop selling everything else
- stop selling what's not your #1 priority. doing does sales would give the impression that you're not focused on #1 to your team and outsiders.
- it takes time to readjust, but once that's done, things are much better
- #5: create a long-term incentive plan for managers
- instead of giving stock bonus, take an equivalent annual bonus and put it aside in long-term incentive account for each manager you want to retain
- #6: find a broker
- find something he sees your business as special, and that you need to be compensated higher for your efforts
- #7: tell your management
- #8: convert offers to a binding deal