Author Michael Podolny at Google+

Creating Your Formula for Selling a Small Business

Creating Your Formula for Selling a Small Business

A Deeper Dive Into Improving the Drivers that Affect Business Value

Sustainable Business Systems (Part 1 of 4)

For the last couple of months, I’ve been focusing various emotional and psychological factors that inhibit owners from achieving the ultimate goals they seek when they decide to sell or do succession.  This month I’m going to go back into what drives the value you can get from your business and things you can be investing into that will make your business more salable, more capable of doing succession and will increase the value you will receive from either.  I will be discussing four of these and will be devoting one post to each.  They are:

• Sustainable business systems
• Scientific marketing and sales
• Repeatable human capital development and management
• Consistent application of accountability and feedback metrics

This post is about sustainable business systems.

Think about everything you do to produce and sell your product or service.  Even if one is a very small business there are many different things that must be done.  Some are direct such as actually producing the product or delivering the service.  Many buttress that activity.  Selling brings in the clients.  Purchasing makes sure we have everything we need to do what we do.  IT provides us with the platforms essential to doing business today.  Accounting makes sure we know how we are doing.  Each activity is a system unto itself and is part of the larger, integrated system that is the business.

Presumably there is a person or there are people who are working each of the systems you have.  Now ask yourself this.  Are you dependent upon the specific people who are doing those functions or do you have processes and procedures that allow you to bring new people effectively into these functions?

If your answer is the former, you do not have sustainable business systems in place.  You are dependent on the individuals.  If your answer is the latter, you do have them and you have put yourself in a position where you have more value, more marketability and a much easier, safer path to succession.

Implementing sustainable business systems is much easier said than done but can be well worth the effort.  If you’d like to find out more, contact me at michael@podolny.com.