Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Exit

Legacies
August 23, 2022

Legacies

We all think we’re going to live forever.

We go through life making our dent in the universe without giving a thought to what might happen to it after we’ve gone.  If we think of a legacy at all, we think of it as money or assets to be left to our children.

There are other ways.

Artists leave a body of work that can remind everyone that comes after of their unique dent.   Writers or composers do even better.  They leave behind the means to re-create their work, so their unique dent can actually get wider and deeper for hundreds of years after they’ve turned to dust.

And many of us start enterprises.  Most of which will die when we do, even when they are successful.

Why?  When with a little effort, we could leave the means to continually renew and expand our dent to reach everyone who needs it for generations to come?

That’s what I’d call a legacy.

And my mission is to help business owners like you leave yours – for generations to come.

 

 

By accident or design?
August 18, 2022

By accident or design?

One day you will have to leave your business.    Will that be by design or by accident?

If you feel strongly about what happens to it once you’re gone, leaving by design is by far the better option.   And the best time to start is now.

After all, you never know what’s around the corner.

Are you building to sell or to last?
August 17, 2022

Are you building to sell or to last?

Are you building your business to sell or to last?

The answer makes a huge difference to what you do before you leave – even if in the end you sell it.

And if the answer’s ‘Neither‘?

Then your business dies with you.

There’s no right answer.

It just helps to be clear.

Exit
April 5, 2019

Exit

Investors and business angels have a clear exit strategy – grow fast for 3-5 years, sell up and crystallise the gains. Happily, this strategy often coincides with that of the entrepreneur, who wants to get this business idea going, and then move on to the next.

Most small business owners don’t have an exit strategy, or certainly don’t start with one.

Thinking about exit often only happens when some event reminds us of our mortality. If that doesn’t happen, the business simply winds down to nothing alongside its owner.

Partly this is due to our natural tendency to think short-term; partly because we simply can’t imagine ourselves without our business, and partly because we don’t believe our business could survive without us.

Perhaps then, rather than focus on our own exit, we could focus instead on the future life of our business as we would focus on the future life of our child – with the aim of making it independent?

If a business was a child, we would nurture it through the early years, then start giving it more responsibility and autonomy, so that when the time is right, the child leaves us, ready, willing and able to make its own dent in the universe.

This doesn’t mean you exit your business with nothing, it just changes who you might sell it to.

Who better than the people who helped you raise it?