Five exits on the way to the exit

Did you know there's more than one 'exit' from a business?

I was having a great chat with a friend of mine and agency coach extraordinaire, Mandi Ellefson, last week when we started chatting about exits.

For many business owners it's the holy grail, the thing they're striving for.

But what if I told you there isn't just one exit.

There are actually five exits available to you as you progress through your business journey.

Just like the big exit of selling your business, each of the five exits comes with a prize too!

This is a concept Mandi wrote about in her book The Hands-Off CEO and is something that I really like.

Both because I like breaking big challenges up into smaller chunks and also because I love a prize!

How about an exit.... before you sell your business?

This concept is most relevant for agency or consulting business owners, however there's a lot of parallels with other businesses too.

Exit 1 - Delegate Client Service & Project Management

As you scale your business with more clients and more projects, those clients and projects need managing.

Continuing to deliver the high standard of service you started with, while scaling, can be tricky.

Especially as you get super busy.

The solution is to hire someone to take this off your hands.

Like a client account manager, a client project manager or a customer success manager.

Want to know what a great account manager looks like?

Exit 2 - Delegate Operations Management

As you scale, your operation gets more complex.

There's more going on every day.

Things that previously could be handled in Slack now need a process and a project management system.

As you build out a team and have more people involved, you need systems and processes to ensure you can scale successfully.

That's where a really great Operations Manager comes in.

A really great Operations Manager, like mine (!!), make everything better.

They keep things running smoothly, they jump in and handle issues before you're even aware of them, and crucially they improve the system so they don't happen again.

Want to know what a really great Ops Manager looks like?

Exit 3 - Delegate Client Strategy

If you're building an agency or consulting business then you may have started it because you were really good at something.

Clients loved getting your input into their challenges and helping them figure out the right strategy for them.

Then your team could implement for them.

But it's still you doing the strategy!

Until it's not...!

Delegating client strategy, delivering the true wisdom that gets your clients on the right path, is key if you're to free yourself up from every client and allow your business to scale.

Mandi does a great job of explaining this in her book.

It's a tricky area and the key way to exit this area is by having a proven process and system that allows you to hire the very best people to? explain and lead your clients to get the results they want.

I don't have a picture of what one of these looks like as I still enjoy helping our clients too much but with my new Head of Recruitment, Debra, I've got the right person to let me exit this in the future!

Exit 4 - Delegate Sales

In The Hands-Off CEO, Mandi writes 'Less mature CEOs tend to jump ahead to this exit because sales is time-consuming and full of rejection'.

This is exactly what I did!

I've talked about delegating sales a lot over the past year as I went through my own journey of implementing proper sales process and delegating sales here at JobRack.

I learnt a ton, and as a result, I realised late last year that I'd delegated too early and there was more work to do before that was the right thing for me to do.

If only I'd been able to read Mandi's book a year earlier! (In my defence it didn't come out until after I'd made this mistake!)

I'll revisit delegating sales sometime over the next year, making sure I learn from both my own experience and also from Mandi's book!

If you're a little further on then this is a great exit to achieve, so long as you do it the right way, with solid foundations that can ensure your sales exit is a success.

Exit 5 - Executive Leadership

This is the very last thing that a CEO will typically let go of.

True leadership of the business, including vision and direction of the company.

This is the point when you'd normally transition from CEO to investor and often is a step you'll skip if you're actually looking to sell the business.

It's a tricky one to hire for and would often go to someone inside the company, particularly if you've been training and developing a senior team of leaders along the way.

So they're the five exits. You might have been thinking there was just one exit to aim for.

Now we've broken things down into smaller, more achievable steps.

Five exits not one... and even more great concepts for scaling your business

If you'd like to read more about these ideas, and other absolute gems of scaling your business, then definitely check out Mandi's book - The Hands-Off CEO.

What's the the key to successful exits.... you need the right people of course!

• To delegate client management you need really great client account managers.
• To delegate operations you need an awesome operations manager.
• Delegating client strategy needs really high quality delivery people.
• Sales.... well that needs not only great sales systems and processes but also needs the right kind of sales people for your business too.
• Finally, to delegate the CEO role you need to have developed the right leaders within your business, and that starts with hiring the right people.

Whichever exit you're aiming for we can help you to hire the right people.

We'll understand the people you need, then we'll get out there and find them (these guys and girls aren't hanging out on job boards just waiting for your advert!).

We'll do all the hard work of hiring for you AND we'll guarantee your new team member for a full year with our 1-year guarantee.

So if you'd like to chat through who you might need to get to your next exit, book in some time to chat at https://jobrack.eu/call and let's have some fun talking about exits!

Happy Hiring

Noel