Seriously, you can’t!

Lots of successful business owners will tell you how they built their business at the expense of their mental and physical health, marriage, relationships, financial wellbeing and spiritual wellness.

Or you may have heard the ones about how the owner worked themselves to death - never getting to enjoy vacation, retirement or other fruits of their labor.

I don’t know about you, but that’s not what I signed up for.

That’s why I recently did an episode of the #BOLDBusinessPodcast with host, Jess Dewell, Managing Partner at Red Direction, and Quentin Ortega, Founder and Lead Consultant at QCO Consulting to discuss what to do when you can’t work any harder.

It really starts with making choices - deciding what you really want and what you’re not willing to sacrifice along the way.

By prioritizing, you get to focus on being consistent (way more important than discipline) in how you use and manage your energy to understand and focus on doing the things that create the most value for you and your business so the right people are doing the right work at the right time to achieve shared (read: clear and understood) outcomes.

A business exit strategy starts long before you’re ready to sell because the things that reduce your work load, increase your freedom, and improve profitability are also the things that build value for buyers.

Often at the top of a buyer’s list - can the business operate profitably and continue to grow without the owner?

You heard me, they they don’t want to buy from an owner who has to put in 60 hours a week and never takes a vacation.

They want to buy a business that has standard operating procedures, professional management, sustainable recurring revenue and low customer concentration from a business owner who designed their business to live beyond them.

Building a sellable business takes forethought and intention. It requires you to prioritize so you can work smarter, not harder. It requires a team that understand your priorities and consistently focuses on doing the things required to get the best results.

Let us help you build it.

Purpose First Advisors specializes in helping business owners level-up their approach to business growth and profitability. Let us help you build, grow and exit your business  on purpose, with purpose.

It's super easy to think of the things that drive you crazy about being a business owner.

Right now, somethin’ is workin’ your nerves!

And since energy follows intention, you could be sending a lot of energy into perpetuating the things that are most frustrating, distracting, annoying or worrisome about your business.

Being intentional about the mindset and heart-set you bring to your business everyday can help

Not feelin' the love? Try these three strategies:

1. Practice gratitude: Write down the things your business has made possible for you, your family, employees, clients and community in the last 90 days or more. If your business wasn't here, what would be missed? What might other people say they're grateful for that your business made possible? What would you be doing now if you weren’t growing your business and how would you feel?

Even if your business isn’t yet living up to all your expectations - what’s going right?

2. Embrace reality: Chances are, you have a few stories you tell yourself about your business - why this happens or that’s not possible. Take a look at the things in your business that are consistently frustrating. Those things are likely features (built in by design) rather than bugs (mistakes that need can/will be eliminated.)

If you accept those things as features, how might your feelings about the situation change? If you reset your expectations and, for example, accept that certain things require long time lines or that churn is the norm for certain positions, can you plan accordingly and reduce your frustration? What other benefits will come for planning for rather than working around or ignoring certain realities of how your business operates?

3. Celebrate the small stuff: When you're super focused on the future, you can lose site of the small wins along the way. Celebrating incremental progress on big goals will help you and your team feel good about the journey, especially when the destination feels far off.

Ask yourself what you want to celebrate at the end of the next 90 days. This might include celebrating what you stopped, started, delegated, outsourced, documented, decided, or resolved. (Psst - there’s nothing wrong with adding some early wins to get things going!)

Write it down and identify what next steps will help you make that celebration a reality.

Schedule time to review your wins and make a big deal about what you and your team have accomplished.

BONUS Tip! You are not your business. You get to decide how you feel about how your business operates, what outcomes it creates for you, and whether it is living up to your expectations.

Even when things don’t go the way you want or expected, you can choose how you feel about it and if you act on those feelings.

Think about who you are surrounded by and whether they help you identify and manage your emotions. Do they help you see how a mistake created a learning opportunity? Do they challenge you to see situations from different perspectives? Do they encourage you to keep trying? Do they acknowledge how hard being a business owner is while also helping you unleash its potential?

Leveling up your peers and advisors can unlock new ways of thinking and feeling about your business and the many roles you play in i!

Purpose First Advisors specializes in helping business owners level-up their approach to business growth and continuity. Let us help you build, grow and exit your business  on purpose, with purpose.

I know a lot of business owners who look forward to the day when they don’t have to show up at the office any more. 

Yet how to exit your business may not feel like the most relevant thing to focus on right now. Maybe you aren’t ready to sell or don’t know if you even want to sell.

But I bet that one of the reasons you decided to build a business was more personal freedom.

It’s hard to be free when the business that was meant to increase your independence and flexibility has you chained to an office, desk, production floor or job site.

Those chains are known as owner dependence - your business depends on you to perform core functions, make and deliver on sales, solve problems, make key decision, or do the job of 2 or more people.

If your business depends on you in this way, it may be out of necessity. Or perhaps it’s by design.

Building a successful business is gratifying. So it solving big problems, landing new business, developing new products and being in control. That’s why it’s so easy to get chained up and stay that way.

Which means, one of the biggest hurdles that stands between you and the freedom you’ve always wanted your business to provide is: YOU.

Aside from being a huge red flag to a potential buyer, owner dependence is the thing that will keep you tethered to your business long after you want to get out of the day-to-day (which is probably years before you wan to exit.)

By making yourself indispensable, you’re taking on more than one person should and creating bottlenecks that starve the business of the oxygen it needs to grow.

It’s also likely that you’re overstating profit because you’re not hiring and training a professional management team to execute your vision. 

I know, no one cares about your business as much as you do. And no one you’ve tried bringing in as a “number two” has come close to being as good as you at key functions like sales. 

But if you 

Then you’re on a path to nowhere. 

Creating business transferability - being prepared to fire yourself - starts with identifying all the ways your business depends on you to function and how you encourage that dependence to your own detriment. 

At the heart of each functional role that keeps you tied to your business is a failure to delegate. Failure to delegate is often tied to a lack of trust in others, a lack of process for others to follow, a fear of having your decisions questioned, a desire to avoid feeling vulnerable or exposed, and trepidation about what it means for your business to truly exist without you. 

So where do you start? 

Shift your mindset 

 Build a Team

Make things replicable

Step out of the spotlight

No one needs 11 (more) things to do at the end of the year.

So hopefully, most of the following items will be things you’re already doing.

Personally, I like having a list so that I can check my plan against what others recommend. I also appreciate having a roadmap to follow when decision fatigue sets in and I need help staying focused.

I hope this list inspires you to use the incredible power of endings and beginnings to set your intentions for 2024 and recommit yourself to your goals.

Let’s get set for a prosperous and successful new year!

1. Contact your CPA.

2. Reconcile your books.

3. Build your financial projections for 2024.

4. Say thank you to

5. Clean off your desk (and desktop.) Get your paper and digital house in order to make space for new ideas.

6. Take a break.

7. Schedule a meeting with your financial advisor and estate planning attorney for January to review your

8. Celebrate your wins. Go through your calendar and remind yourself of all you and your team have accomplished this year - big and small. 

9. Let the mistakes go. There will always be things that didn't go as planned. And decisions you wish you could re-do.

10. Help others.

11. Receive help. Give yourself the gift of filling your own cup.

Purpose First Advisors specializes in helping business owners like you go into the new year ready to grow smarter, faster and with more confidence. Let us help you build and grow on purpose.

 

Being a business owner can be…conflicting.

Let me explain.

I wear at least three hats relative to my business:

  1. Management 
  2. Owner/investor
  3. Family member

You wear these hats, too. 

Like me, your job is to manage your business. You’re probably doing the work of 2 or 3 people. And you’re the most reliable employee - responsible, accountable, detail oriented, and deadline driven.

You wish you had ten of you! 

You’re also responsible for making sure that you and other employees are doing their part to ensure that you’re getting a return on your investment. That the everyday decisions being made and work being done increases the value of your business over time in a way that you can ‘take to the bank’ at some point. 

Of course, you’re building your business to provide for your family. You have obligations and responsibilities to fulfill for them. Sometimes doing what’s best for your family is also what’s best for your business. 

Sometimes not.

And even if you’re not in business with family members, they might have a lot to say about decisions you’re making as owner/investor and manager. 

In short, your different roles are sometimes in conflict, needing contradictory things at the same time, competing for finite resources, or requiring you to disappoint someone you love because it’s what’s best for your business in the long run. 

Here’s where you embrace the suck.

Honestly, there’s no way out of it. 

You had role conflict as an employee. Now you have role conflict as the employer. 

Choosing to work for yourself means you’ve traded off some restrictions and limitations for others. 

But you also have the ability to identify where conflict exists, purposefully align goals, intentionally manage resources, and consciously deal with the demands of, well, being you.

Start by recognizing that your family and your business are interconnected and separate from you while profoundly impacting your identity and sense of self.

Then accept responsibility for managing the coordination and tradeoffs your different roles require.

Conquering Conflict

There are five steps to creating and aligning your family and business plans. 

1. Identify your assets: what valuable and useful things do you already have that you want to protect, improve and/or grow? What’s most important to you?

2. Protect what you have: what, if anything, is needed to protect the assets you have?

3. Build with intention: what long-term opportunities exist? What investments do you want to make to grow or enhance your life?

4. Reap and steward your rewards: oftentimes, to reap the rewards of building a loving, happy family you will want to spend more time with them and doing the things you love. Early on, your family probably took the hit when you had to choose between a baseball game and a networking event. In order to reduce your family’s sacrifice and increase the rewards of owning your own business, it needs to provide you with income and generate profit when you’re not there. How much the business needs to provide depends on what you need and how you want to spend your time and money.

5. Reflect: what has this process revealed? Has it changed how you will approach business planning for 2024 and beyond? 

 

There are a lot of reasons my siblings and I didn’t go into the family floral business but the biggest one is that my dad worked for himself. He build a job not a transferable asset.

In the beginning, it was a means to an end that allowed him to take care of his family and work for himself.

In the middle, it was easier to keep on keeping on than it was to strategically respond to a changing market, create a plan, document and professionalize processes, and design the business to operate without him.

In the end, there was no business exit plan. It was too late and there was nothing of real value to pass on or to sell. 

An asset can be grown, shared, gifted, sold, collateralized, liquidated, repurposed, or monetized.

A job can’t. 

If you focus on maximizing income without also building value in your business, you limit your options and diminish how much wealth you can generate by being a business owner. (Hint: value is more than revenue and there are many ways to build value and exit a business.) 

My dad’s choices feel particularly relevant as clients of all ages are asking me

The truth is, most owners assume they have lots of time and only a few options for when and how to exit their business.

There are actually lots of options - including more than one exit opportunity for the same business.

And, in it’s current state, your business probably isn’t attractive to a buyer.

Given that 70% of businesses that go to market don’t sell, there’s no time like the present to start assessing your business readiness and attractiveness so that you have plenty of time to increase the value of your business before it’s time to exit. 

The good news is that many businesses can improve their attractiveness to buyers and readiness for the process by making choices now about how to grow strategically. You can start by

This approach not only builds value in the long-term, it also increases income right now.

Which means a solid growth strategy = near-term gain = a solid exit plan for the future.

Exit planning isn’t a separate process from your annual visioning and planning. It’s an intentional approach to business growth that prioritizes asset building over income acceleration, without having to sacrifice either. 

So, if my Dad had treated his business as an asset and not just an income stream, what would that look like? 

1.Create value. Make sure the business has all the resources it needs to grow - staff, customers, processes, and relationships. Taking yourself out of the equation as much as possible is essential. If the business relies on you for sales, product development, and/or key relationships it has little value for someone else. 

For example, by building a list of well defined, qualified leads, you add to your business’ value. Likewise, by having guaranteed recurring revenue, replicable processes and procedures, and a well known and reputable brand, you make your business more valuable. Value is also derived from solid cash flow management, consistent profitability, and investments in the business infrastructure. You have to assess where your business is in all areas to know where you need to invest time building value. 

Most of your business value will come from intangible assets, your intellectual capital - people, relationships, processes, and reputation.

Seriously! 

You need a strong P&L, balance sheet and cash flow. But that’s not enough.

2. Grow. Since your business needs to operate without you, you probably need to increase revenue and cash flow so you can hire a management team capable of successfully running the business. Growing your business may also require additional capital. You may need to invest time and money to position yourself to get top dollar when you transition. 

Once in place, the management team needs to strategically grow the business for sustained success. Buyers want to know that your business has the potential to create more profit and wealth for them. And you deserve to get the most out of your business while it provides you income and when you harvest its value. Preparing to exit is good business strategy. 

3. Plan your next act. This is especially important if you need a specific amount of money from the sale of your business to finance your retirement or next venture. Do the proceeds from the sale need to be invested to replace your income? Or will that money seed a new venture? Will it help you travel or fund your grandchildren’s education?

In addition to knowing how much you need to live the life you want, you also need to know what you want to do with your time when you no longer have a business to run.  According to the Exit Planning Institute, 76% of business owners who sold their businesses profoundly regretted selling within a year. Don’t underestimate the feelings you will have about selling. This is a big deal. A major life transition that needs to be planned for. You’re way more attached to your business than you think you are. 

You are not your business. You built your business but it exists separate and apart from you. It’s worth is not your worth. It’s one part of what you do but not who you are. 

4. Engage advisors. There are no less than seven ways to exit a business in an orderly manner. And there are hundreds of ways to do it that can destroy more than a once reliable income stream. 

Yes, good planning takes time.

Yes, good planning takes money. 

This is true whether you're planning to exit or just trying to get the most out of your business right now. Great execution requires more than a good plan. It requires several teams, a few outstanding individual performers, and a leader who can put the right people and resources into play at the right time to achieve success. 

As owner, you’re the visionary and quarterback. Your job is to lead your team to deliver consistent wins, relentlessly, over and over again, despite the circumstances, through both your personal performance and your singular ability to strategize and lead others. 

Your management team is the team on the field responsible for execution on the front lines, in real time. 

Your advisory team is equivalent to the team behind every legendary quarterback who has walked onto the field. This team helps them train, condition, strategize, and focus mentally, emotionally and physically to visualize and manifest success. Yours will do the same and help you push through the pain, prepare for the unexpected, develop new plans in response to specific competitors, reduce your distractions, engrain the fundamentals, and recover from setbacks. 

You’re the starting quarterback. The leader of your advisor team is your backup quarterback. This is usually a business consultant, value or growth advisory, someone who understands your vision and can mobilize and organize other advisors to help you deliver effective decision-making and consistent accuracy in executing toward your goal. 

Feels pretty intense, huh.

Don’t get me wrong, it is. 

But the thing is, you work hard in and on your business everyday. Building an asset vs. an income stream doesn’t require you to work harder, only smarter.

Vision, intention, planning, resource deployment, and execution take your work from intense to purposeful.

Working with an advisor - one to start, others as needed - gives you the depth of bench you need to get and stay focused.

Shall we get started planning your business exit?

Frankly, we don’t talk enough about pricing, profitability or paying yourself as small business owners. 

So let’s talk. 

Paying Yourself

This is why you started your business - to make money doing something you love. But did you ever ask yourself

Building a business that isn’t or can’t achieve your financial goals is a waste of time, IMHO. If you don’t need the money and the business isn’t profitable then it's a hobby, and that’s ok.

I love hobbies but I don’t expect my crocheted blankets to pay the bills and while I love coaching and consulting with business owners I won’t keep doing it if it means I struggle to make ends meet.

I assume all business owners want their business to help them create a life they love, one that has some degree of financial comfort, perhaps even freedom. 

So let’s get real about what you want to make and how frequently you need to be paid. 

Then figure out how much the BUSINESS has to make for you to hit your financial goals and take care of your obligations (taxes.) You can use this template to get started. 

Profit

You can’t pay yourself competitively and consistently if your business isn’t generating a profit. 

Just because there’s money coming into the business doesn’t mean it’s profitable. 

Profit is what’s left over AFTER you pay all the bills (COGs and operating expenses), pay yourself, set aside money for taxes, and service debt. 

Profit allows you to create a reserve so you can fund your operations for at least 3 months. 

It gives you flexibility to make new hires, buy new equipment, upgrade technology, or make other investments to grow your business. 

It gives you breathing room so you don’t have to panic each time payroll is due. 

In many businesses, it’s reasonable to expect that you won’t be profitable right away. You may have to put more money into the business than you take out. That’s why it’s so important to do projections (the silent P in this list!) Projections are a way to forecast the future. IF we do A, B and C we can expect the result to be X, Y and Z. 

Like profit, projections don’t magically become true. They’re your best guess about how to run your business so it can meet all its financial goals. Never run projections or want some help getting better, click here to schedule an appointment. 

Pricing 

Pricing truly is both an art and a science. 

Some industries are price sensitive with most sellers priced in a narrow range because buyers won’t tolerate big deviations. 

Whenever possible, you’re not looking for the customer who wants the lowest price. Your customer wants the best outcome - whether that’s to look and feel beautiful, save time, or increase performance. They want specific results they’re willing to pay for. 

Pricing requires you to understand what it costs you to produce and deliver your goods and/or services, what indirect expenses you need to cover, and your desired profit margin. 

The single biggest pricing mistake I see owners make is to leave the cost of their labor out of the pricing equation. 

In most small businesses, the owner is doing a key business function. You’re probably the person making the body butter, providing the counseling, doing the renovations, designing the greeting card - you get the idea. If you were paying someone else to provide that labor you would consider them a direct cost. So why wouldn’t you do the same for your labor?! 

You can never replace yourself in the business if you aren’t factoring the cost of your labor into your price AND paying yourself market rate for doing that job. 

Just ‘paying yourself out of profits’ isn’t a thing for small business owners. You can’t live off a quarterly dividend. You need the equivalent of a regular salary. And one of the benefits of ownership is that you can take additional distributions when profit margins allow. 

So your price has to take into account what it will cost to pay you, cover other direct expenses, and contribute to indirect expenses, profit and taxes. 

Once you create your pricing template you’ll use it when considering pricing changes, creating new products, launching new services, or creating new packages. Not sure where to start? I’ve got a template for that too!

Recently, I got a panicked email from a client saying business was way down the prior month and lamenting that they never should have raised prices. 

Of course, there is always cause for concern when sales are down from historic trends. And increased pricing may have impacted sales with some (price sensitive clients) opting to go with other sellers. 

It may also be true that 

And in this instance a price increase was necessary because the old pricing model was not profitable. So having more sales with little to no profit margin wouldn’t be much better than having fewer, more profitable sales. 

I share this to say, in your business there are lots of variables impacting revenue, expenses, cash flow, and profitability. Often, the most obvious explanation for what’s going on is part of the answer but not the whole answer. 

This client is also rebranding, updating their website and focusing on a higher-end niche client. Those shifts can impact revenue and profit in the near term. They will need to make changes to their sales and marketing, which may cost more, impacting expenses in the near term and revenue generation long term. And they are adding a new line of business that can help them tap a new market. 

Lots of moving parts. 

Which is what I tried to remind them of when I replied. But it can be hard to step back and take a second look when things feel like they’re going the wrong way. 

That’s why it's important to have ways to catch changes before they show up on your income statement and freak you out! 

You might (regularly) look at the

The key is knowing what indicators matter most for YOUR business. What’s gonna give you the best idea of what’s going on or at least alert you to where you need to be looking. 

Think about what information will help you know if your revenue, expenses and profit goals are within reach or if you need to make some real-time changes. 

Be intensely curious about what’s going on in your business and industry.

Bring your awareness to things you don’t like doing in your business and whether those areas might need more attention to drive results.

In a recent interview with Cheryl Mucha of CFO Your Way I was asked, ‘why do people come to you? What’s their pain point?’

Most often, business owners find me when

They know they need to do something but want to avoid the proverbial face plant.

Fear of the face plant can keep you stuck, hesitant to make any move even though you know you can’t stay put.

Or it can drive you to take action - any action - to avoid the anxiety of feeling like you’re falling behind and missing opportunities.

Neither gets you where you want to go. More importantly, these approaches don’t help you have more clarity and confidence as an owner and a leader.

I specialize in helping business owners like you find that clarity and cultivate the confidence you need to define, plan and achieve your desired end result for your business.

That looks different for everyone but usually includes a combination of

Sure, we work on, create and discuss financial statements and financial projections, org charts and procedure manuals, and delegation and prioritization.

We also spend a lot of time talking through issues, thinking through scenarios and honing your ability to lead effectively - from personal habits, time management and planning techniques to providing your team with the tools and frameworks they need to work smart on your behalf.

And there is the accountability piece. Since consistently doing the basics - the everyday things that you need to do to meet deadlines, deliver on brand promises, build strong relationships, and work efficiently - is the single most effective way to out perform your competition and meet your goals, the other thing I do is provide the encouragement you need to stay focused and consistent.

As my friend Jess Dewell and I talk about often, it’s all about defining the destination, charting your course and staying the course.

Do those three things and sustainable, profitable business growth is yours to achieve.

Need a little inspiration to jump start your aspirations?

Listen to my whole conversation with Cheryl Mucha. Then reach out so we can talk about how to get you headed in the right direction.

It’s easy to start doing things that feel productive but don’t help you achieve your growth goals.

If you’re feeling pulled in a lot of different directions or you just can’t seem to hit your revenue or profit goals, you probably need to evaluate whether you’ve selected the right growth levers and sufficiently invested enough time and money to get the results you want.

In other words, growing your business requires you to know

There are lots of ways to increase revenue. By evaluating and choosing the method that is best for your company you can focus your time, energy, and money on specific tasks. Be effective, not just busy.

This allows you to stay the course as uncertainty and ambiguity tempt you to throw the kitchen sink at achieving your goal.

And, because you’ve evaluated the different strategies available to you, you can assess the effectiveness of the strategy you’ve selected and pivot as new information is available.

The ability to be resilient and reorient activities to stay aligned to achieving your desired end result is critically important. 

But first you need to figure out what business lever(s) you’ll use. You then pick a strategy for deploying that lever. 

Please note: I hesitate to put the ‘s’ in parentheses - for almost every small business it's in your best interest to focus on deploying one lever at a time, with full commitment and focus. 

Business Levers for Growth

So what’s a business lever?

It’s an organized approach to solving a business problem (or maximizing a business opportunity) that allows you to drive growth. 

What lever(s) you use depends on your market, industry and business model. 

No one can write an article that will help you sort through all possible levers and tell you which one to use to grow your business. However, they commonly involve deploying some combination of money, people, processes, time, products/services, or technology to grow. The lever you choose should be based on 1) available data (internal and external) and 2) analysis of your capacity and capability to execute. 

Sources of data: 

Capacity and Capability:

Examples of Levers:

You’re looking for levers that can create the growth in ways that are sustainable. Top line growth alone won’t necessarily grow the bottom line long term. 

Pro tip: Focus on levers that increase profit not just revenue. 

Still feels a little overwhelming, right?

In my experience, it's always helpful to get an outside perspective. Someone with fewer emotional ties to certain strategies and less bias about specific choices. 

Working with a trusted advisor, someone solely focused on helping you achieve success as you’ve defined it, can bring clarity and peace of mind to business decisions. 

That’s not a luxury. 

You deserve to feel calm and confident as a business owner.

Let’s talk.

maroon quotation marks
  • Christy’s keen ability to identify my actual needs and focus me on the critical aspects of my business has been transformative. She’s provided insights and asked probing questions that emphasize the importance of planning with the end in mind.
    Stephanie Haenchen
    Owner, Pace Marketing
  • Christy’s coaching has has been instrumental in elevating my business to new heights. Her ability to facilitate strategic conversations has been transformative, helping me identify opportunities, overcome obstacles, and refine my business strategies for optimal results.
    Paya Sample
    Owner, Peak Leaders Collective
  • Christy took the time to assess my business model, understand my goals, and identify areas for improvement. What impressed me most was her ability to provide tailored strategies that were practical and immediately implementable.
    Sue Bailey
    Owner, Celebrating Life Cakes
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