Starting a business is a BIG deal. Building it to become more than your hobby is even bigger again. In fact, building your business into an asset may result in it being possibly the largest asset you’ll ever own, or second maybe to your home.
If trying to sell it is what you eventually want to do, getting strategic about WHAT it is you’ve got and how it is someone else could do it is key. The Online Strategy question features more and more as part of this discussion.
What is the “story” of your Business?
Each business has its evolutionary history, as well as its current story, which is all-important. More buyers now are also asking about the online history and requesting the statistics to back it up. If you’ve gone down the path of being online, be sure to track all the important information about this channel, as it will be requested. If you have not got online (yet), there needs to be an apparent “why” to satisfy the question.
What does your Business sell?
List everything; not just the features, but the benefits to your consumers as well.
- Why do they buy from you?
- Did your Business always conduct business the way it currently does?
- If not, what has changed? Why the current choice?
- What other options are open in your market that you haven’t done yet?
These questions definitely require an online and offline response.
How can you prove how well your Business Model has been working?
Profit – that’s what a buyer wants to know about.
This scorecard is very important to a prospective buyer because that’s what they will base a lot of their “valuation” decisions on. The records, both offline and online, provide evidence that your Business is the worthy asset you claim it is.
Starting with the end in mind TODAY, regardless of how old your business is, means you can start to, slowly but surely, assemble, lock in and gather the answers to each one of these questions, to be able to convey to a potential buyer WHAT it is they are buying…
