How to Improve Small Business Evaluations

How to Improve Small Business Evaluations

How to Change the Valuation of Your Business

Developing an Outcome Driven Strategy

The End Comes First (Part 1 of 4)

Improvisation is a wonderful skill.  I’m a pretty good improvising cook.  I have friends who are good at improvising a story or music.  However, I don’t know of anyone who could improvise the construction of a building.  What’s the difference?  Why can’t we have an improvising general contractor?

It comes down to differences of scope and scale.  Even the improvising cook is probably not going to improvise a major banquet for a thousand people.  Likewise the builder might improvise handling some aspect of a building project but will require blueprints – a plan that defines the very specific outcome desired – for the entirety of the project.

Owners understand this intellectually but it is hardly how they typically manage the overall direction of their business.  Ask an owner what their overall goal for their business is and you will most likely get a vague answer about wanting to grow and wanting to sell their business some day.  That may do alright for getting by day-by-day but it is hardly the type of thinking that will really change the value we might achieve for our business.

To do that we have to use ends driven planning.  In my next three installments, I will be discussing how we define the ends themselves in a practical way, how we build a strategy based upon our defined ends, and how we make these strategies actionable so we can achieve the results desired.