SELL-EBRATE! Successfully Exit Your Business

Two important things that can increase transferability

Gary Morris

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 6:40
SPEAKER_00

What is something that can build a really solid transferable foundation to any business? So there's two things I would cover in this question. One of them is going to be culture. I think it's underrated. I think the term gets used a lot, but I think the actual capabilities of birth building a transferable culture actually let me rephrase that as I think through this out loud. And it's even more hard to build a good culture, period. Now the reason why it's hard to make it transferable is because if you have the capabilities of doing this, which is honestly very rare, it it is so ingrained into the founders and typically a founding family, that that culture, in order to remain the same, would take it an extreme amount of work. And those typical situations require a strategic buyout. And that could be key employees, um, or somebody very close to the company, maybe a consultant that's worked with them for many years. But I I would first say building a good culture makes for an extremely successful company if you can do it right. And I've seen this only a handful of times where culture really was an asset to the company. But again, the the legacy component of that culture sustainability is dependent upon who the buyer is. So looking for just some generic investors or buyers in that scenario is uh not going to be ideal if culture is an asset. So you have to kind of look at that one a little bit different. The other thing is identifying, being able to identify the type of clients that you want to work with. And this really does go for any market. So I remember Dan Sullivan wrote a book called Always Be the Buyer. And that the point of the book is that you, no matter if you are offering your service to somebody, you essentially need to become the buyer. You need to be reviewing and qualifying the people that you want to work with and being the best possible, you know, highest collaborative relationships as much as you possibly can. Now, this always isn't necessarily always going to be the same, and that would be my low gas uh baby, so I apologize for that. Um, but it is essential, you know. So for us at Vantage, our five-star prospects are people who are first willing to engage. So if we have to do a lot of chasing, uh they typically get moved into the not qualified currently category because we really are looking for those people who are wanting the problem of selling their business to be solved. So here they are, they're willing to engage, they're friendly and cooperative, they know what they want, they know when they want it, and they would like our help. It's that simple. Willing to engage, friendly and cooperative, know what they want, know when they want it, and they would like our help. And if any of those five-star principles are not connected, we slowly begin to taper our services away from those people. So, you know, for instance, if somebody is not, you can just tell on the phone they're not friendly, they're not they're they're almost interrogating, and if you're in a desperate situation where you need them more than they need you, then I understand the pull to try to get that business, but it's not gonna be fun, and you're gonna end up probably breaking even at best because they're just going to uh circumvent so many uh opportunities. So you you need to be able to pre-qualify the people that you want to work with. So you're always gonna be the buyer. Now, what do you do if you're an e-comp business or something like that? Um you know, if if you're selling a product more than a service, this could look a little bit different, but you still should have an idea of who your your best customers are. So that way when you build marketing collateral, you can look for them and try to avoid the ones that are problematic. But this primarily goes for if you're a service-based business, that this is you need to have some type of five-star approach. These are the major qualifiers for people to work with us. And I learned this from a mentor of mine, and as we went through some of his five-star qualifiers, you know, it made sense. And if they didn't fit some of those qualifications, it just so happened they weren't going to be a good fit. And as you get more and more business and you know that you can really help people because you've tapped into their markets in ways that other people may have not, then you can begin to look more tighter at those qualifiers. And another thing that I've noticed too is that when I have that pre-qualification kind of in the back of my mind, those people will, you know, walk away and kind of check themselves out just as quick as I'm looking for ways to check them out. There's just immediately not a connection. And I may be less enthusiastic, I might be doing things a little bit uh more loose than I normally would if I really don't want to work with them, and and the relationship kind of just moves in the direction it should quicker than I even have to move it. So get yourself at least a qualification list as you're looking to grow your business, increase its value, know what your your really good prospects are, and you know, at the least, having this to be able to vocalize to buyers hey, these are our best prospects, does go in in the information packet that we would include in selling your business. And most brokers would want that information. So think that through and then use that lens going forward into the rest of 2026.