Your Personal War and How to Win

Welcome to the Better Business Brief, where I share takeaways from:

• running a business I’m building to sell for millions
• my consulting with business owners building to sell for millions
• tips and tricks you can use to do the same

In my line of work, I’m pretty attuned to the process of selling a business, and by extension, PREPARING to sell a business.

I can say with confidence, selling a business is very much like going to war.

This might sound dramatic, but I can back it up…

Today, in less than 5 minutes, I’ll give you:

?? The 10 stages of winning your war

?? How to execute each one

?? 5 things to store in your war chest

When I describe this process of “Going to War”, I break it down into 10 stages.

Here they are:

1. Strike While the Iron is Hot: Alexander the Great once won a pivotal war against the Persians by quickly taking advantage of an opening in their forces and charging right at their leader, winning a battle that secured the war for him. Business owners must prepare to capitalize on their peak moments ruthlessly. The best and most profitable time to sell your business is when it’s thriving and growing, because that is when someone will pay the most for it.
2. Fill the Armory: Preparing for war requires a well-stocked armory. In business, this translates to having all your systems, processes, and documents meticulously organized and accessible for a future buyer. You can document your operational strategies, ensuring you’re battle-ready for the sale.
3. Lock Down Your Forces: Your employees and contractors are your army. Having transparent conversations to understand their goals and ensuring that they’re equipped for their roles going forward is crucial. The more certainty you can have that they are locked down in their positions, and not going anywhere anytime soon, the better prepared your business is to not only run without you, but also be able to sell without you in it.
4. Give Out Your Commands: Delegating responsibilities effectively is like assigning your generals and lieutenants their roles in battle. Drawing on the armory you stocked before, you can begin to give tasks, roles, and responsibilities to employees from that armory to empower them to run the business more and more without you.
5. Become Open-Minded: Flexibility and adaptability can turn the tide of war. When selling your business, being open to different sale structures and transition periods can make your business more appealing to a broader range of buyers, maximizing the amount of money you are able to get for it.
6. Draw Up a Battle Plan: Identifying strategic buyers is like planning your battle strategy. Your battle strategy here should involve a list of potential buyers and also a very intentional plan of how to approach them and gauge interest in buying your business. Failure to plan intentionally can have dire effects in the same way that going to war without a battle strategy can.
7. Dictate the Narrative: Controlling the narrative is crucial in both war and business sales. In order to do this, you must anticipate potential buyer questions and concerns, craft a compelling story of your business’s value, and steer conversations in the right direction to highlight your strategic advantages, gathering information without revealing too much.
8. Recruit a Hero: Every great leader needs allies. In war, there is usually a hero that turns the tides in your favor. Whether it’s a business broker, an M&A firm, or an exit planning consultant, choosing the right partner can provide the support you need to navigate the complexities of selling your business, and make sure you have the expertise to secure victory.
9. Go on the Offensive: The final push in any battle is critical. Proactively approaching potential buyers with a compelling offer, you can leverage all the preparation and strategic planning to initiate negotiations and close the deal on favorable terms.
10. Become Victorious: To win a war, you have to do all the little things well. That’s why each of the previous steps builds upon the other. Once you have done all of these, winning your war looks like this:

Armed with the readiness to seize opportunity, you're going to do so when you see it.

Armed with the resources, documents, systems, and processes to showcase the opportunity, you're going to use them.

Armed with the employees and leaders to run the business in your absence, you're going to make this believable.

Armed with the openness to multiple forms of sale, you're going to find a fit.

Armed with a plan of action, you're going to execute on it.

Armed with a compelling narrative, you're going to speak it into existence.

Armed with the perfect hero and a position of strength, you're going to bring about a decisive victory in the form of selling your business for life changing money.

It’s all great to understand conceptually how to “go to war” for your business, but you also need tactics for how to get there.

I made an incredibly comprehensive video walking through exactly how I recommend following these 10 steps. You can catch it here to help personalize this to your business:

We recently did a pretty big overhaul to update our service offerings in my company. We started taking notes of some of the tools, systems, and processes we have seen work across different industries to help businesses grow.

Here is one solution we prescribe for each core operational area to help business owners grow their business more:

A Training Handbook setup - in order to scale up any set of operations, you have to have standards and practices that go beyond just what you are doing yourself as an owner. I like to build out a comprehensive handbook to address the various needs of the business and to give a roadmap to employees and managers for how to handle things without input from the owner. Having this in place streamlines training of new employees and helps you remove yourself from the business more.

A Recruiting/hiring pipeline - hiring people can be expensive - both time-wise and money-wise. I like to build out automation and systems around the hiring process to help streamline it for owners or their managers. The key is that to be able to hire quickly and efficiently, you need to be able to take potential hires through a funnel, just like marketing to customers. You can build out a pipeline to ensure that your potential hires can do just that by providing automation for some of the extra touch points needed to do it effectively. This helps you sort through more people in the hiring process, ensuring that you can eventually find the right fits.

A Sales pipeline - speaking of pipelines, I believe in building out a sales pipeline as well. For people considering buying from you as a business, there is often a journey they take leading into the purchase. To do this at scale, an effective strategy can be building in some extra automated touch points to help them along the journey in the purchasing decision. This helps you systematize the process needed for someone to make an informed decision and then scale up sales by taking a lot of people through it.

Social Media marketing automation - the same way it is prohibitively expensive to hire an in-house CFO, it is very expensive to hire an in-house social media manager. A good alternative to this can be using technology and automation to schedule out social media posts for your business. I like to create marketing materials in large batches and schedule them to post over time, so that it is done once, then repeated regularly. This helps you gain exposure for your business regularly, building awareness, and nurturing prospects who are considering a purchase with your business.

If growing your business to sell is like war, these are your various pieces to place in your war chest. Each one adds tremendous value to your business in a way that can get you more money for it. You don’t grow without intentionality, strategies, and tools to get there. These are things you can put in place to get there.

If you’re curious how we set any of these things up, grab some time here and we’ll help you create a plan for your next stage of growth.

Those who win wars do so with great strategy. Remember to always be strategic in your business, and keep your goal in mind.

Be great. Keeping growing and aspiring. And as always: I hope you got something from this.

If you did, share it with a friend who may too, as this is the best way for me to grow it and make this better.

They can even sign up here :)

Happy value-building to all of you!

See you next time for Better Business Brief,

-Brody

If you are considering selling your business soon, let’s talk. Grab some time here and we’ll make sure your plan is on track.