How To Ensure Your Business Continues to Succeed Without You

In our Value Builder series we explore the eight key factors potential buyers review when looking to acquire a business – maybe yours

How to Ensure Your Business Continues to Succeed Without You

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
-Ernest Hemingway, American Novelist

For your business to be valuable to a purchaser or investor, it must be able to succeed and grow without you.

Business owners often struggle with this because they remain involved in serving customers directly. It feels good to solve people’s problems. Happy customers shower you with praise, you get the satisfaction of feeling needed and you know your customers are getting the best care in your hands. After all, you know your business better than anybody and training others to do the equivalent job without your accumulated knowledge takes a lot of time and can cost a lot of money.

However, the more your customers need you and ask for you personally, the harder it is to focus on growing your business, and – in the long run – the less valuable your company will be.

To start letting go, consider taking four steps:

Get out of the “break/fix” business

It’s a lot easier to train people how to prevent a problem than it is to show them how to fix something once it’s broken. For example, a swimming pool company can teach a summer employee to scoop debris out of a pool each week, but it needs an expert – often the company owner – to replace a pump that overheated due to a clogged drain.

Go on vacation

Start slowly by taking evenings and weekends off completely. Leave your cell phone at the office and do not reply to any messages. Then take a day off midweek and do the same. Build up to where you can take a week off without checking in. At first, employees won’t believe you’re serious … until they see that you’re really not replying to them. Once they realize they’re on their own, the best ones will start to make more decisions independently – it’s amazing how smart most people are if you give them a chance to show it. You’ll also expose your weakest employees and know whom you have to train up or move out.

Ask employees what they would do in your shoes

To get employees to start thinking like an owner, encourage them to solve their own problems. When an employee comes to you with a situation, before jumping in with a solution, ask, “If it were your business, what would you do?” This simple question forces employees to think things through for the good of the business and triggers a decision-making habit that – when cultivated – will have them acting like owners.

Demonstrate to your employees that you trust them

Trust inspires confidence! As your team becomes more confident, they will become leaders themselves and take the success of your business just as seriously as you do.

Letting go is just one of a number of factors that have a substantial impact on the value of your business. You can find out how your business stacks up by taking

the complimentary Value Builder questionnaire available from The Osborne Group. The results give an assessment of the current potential sales value of your company. The Value Builder questionnaire, developed by internationally recognized small business expert John Warrillow, gives results based on findings from over 17,000 companies. Your answers will help determine what drives up, or undermines, your company’s value and steps you could take to increase its value.

To find out how your company is performing, click here to take the Value Builder questionnaire: http://www.thevaluebuildersystem.com/osborne-group

In our upcoming blogs, we’ll examine other Value Builder factors and their impact on your company’s worth. Follow us here for the series:

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