Event Takeaways – Highlighting 4 from Strategies To Maximize Valuation
Last month, we partnered with Greg Stanley, the President and founder of Accelerant Consultants, for a sales workshop Inevitable Business Transition: Top Strategies To Maximize Valuation.
Greg has over 25 years’ experience in business and community leadership. His unique set of experiences gives him a deep understanding of leadership, strategy, sales, and marketing in both small and large company environments.
At the workshop, Greg revealed strategies to maximize the value of the company for business owners to gain the highest valuation during their business transition.
At some point, all business owners need an exit strategy, even if that just means transferring ownership of the company, ie when one owner decides to retire. Choosing an exit strategy for your business may not seem like an obvious step when you’re just starting out, but planning ahead is a vital aspect of growing a business. Planning ahead gives you more time to improve your business, processes, and value in order for the business to become more appealing for a sale. Additionally, it gives you greater confidence in your decisions when the time comes.
Below we’ve broken down some key takeaways from Greg’s workshop:
1. Intentionality starts at the beginning, and must be carried throughout all aspects of the business.
Always begin with a mission statement. What is the mission you want to achieve, what are the objectives you want to achieve within the mission, and how will you eventually reach the greater goal by completing smaller goals in the interim? Provide your sales team with a value proposition that’s effective, compelling and differentiating.
2. Understand what drives the value of the business and what makes your organization marketable/profitable.
Every decision you make should be based on the business’s mission to produce value. Once you understand your value, ensure to rely on those components as you are problem solving and streamlining your processes. Approach every decision with a high degree of intentionality and build a structure around it that enables an optimized sales and marketing function. Do you have a cohesive sales strategy that has defined targets and markets that the sales team is directed to pursue?
3. Hire and coach the right team.
The key is to hire the right people and ensure that everyone is trained and running the business in your image as the business owner. They should be executing in a way that does not put yourself, as the business owner, in a situation where you have to micromanage people, taskes, or processes. If you have to micromanage staff, you have the wrong people. Greg encourages business owners to think about hiring fewer people, but better people. Hiring the proper people, putting them in a position where their task is defined, and allowing them to perform their job all will help you gradually begin to exit from the business.
4. Integrate Sales & Marketing – Make sure the organization determines the customer portfolio and aligns its sales team to convert targets accordingly.
Marketing needs to be approached in the same manner as any other business investment; with a high level of intentionality, a high level of integration with the sales function, and with a goal to build a larger customer base as well as to grow within the existing customer base. While it is beneficial to have a relatively prolific brand, especially if you have a highly developed value proposition and can articulate that in the marketplace, it is also important to have a sales force that has the ability to back that up. Meaning a sales force that can create and cultivate relationships, understand customer issues, build trust with customers, have some cadence of contact that customers will appreciate, and will be viewed as valuable. Employees tasked with sales and marketing should be treated a fully integrated into the continuum for success within the organization.
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