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

Building a Strategy Based Upon an End (Part 3 of 4)

I’ve been discussion with you over the last two weeks improving small business evaluations by adopting an outcome driven strategy.  It’s a basic premise of value building – you have to know and define the value you want to achieve it.  I discussed that outcomes (‘Ends’ in our jargon) should not be thought of in simplistic terms and certainly not restricted to just dollar and cents ‘Ends’.  Finally I brought up the fact that ‘Ends’ can conflict with one another and such conflicts need to be reconciled to get desired results.

Once you have a set of clear non-conflicting ‘Ends’, you can begin to build a strategy for accomplishing them.  To build an effective strategy, you will need to do an assessment.  Your assessment should be a complete top to bottom look at your business and your personal situation compared to the what would be required to achieve the ‘Ends’ you want.  The output of such an assessment is a gap analysis – a summary of what changes you need to make in order to fulfill your ‘Ends’.

Based upon your gap analysis, you can extract a list of projects and build out the specific steps you need for each project.  Determining which projects need to be done first or give the quickest results will allow you to turn your strategy into an action plan.

What I’m going to tell you next is going to be a bit self-serving but it is also true.  You should be very seriously considering the use of a third-party, outside advisor to help you with the assessment and strategy building.  It is extremely difficult to be objective about oneself.  I know.  I went through this with my own business recently and had to bring in an adviser to make it all happen…and I’m the professional who does this!  But I couldn’t be objective about myself.  The reality is that each of us need outside views to gain clarity no matter what your experience.

I would of course love to be that advisor for you but get someone who has experience and who you can trust.

In my next post I will talk about how we make our plan actionable so we get results.