As a successful business owner, you're wearing many hats - perhaps too many. From managing your team to handling finances and marketing, nearly every task seems to demand your attention. What if there was a way to lighten your load without sacrificing quality or productivity? The answer lies in automation.

Naturally, you want to sell your business for as much as possible. Of Course! You’ve put enormous work into your business over the years, it’s only fair to want to get as much as you can out of your exit, but the groundwork for a successful exit needs to be laid along the way. One of the most powerful key factors in maximizing your business’s value often gets overlooked: the importance of solid financial reporting, planning, and accounting processes.

Business partnerships, like any relationship, can evolve and change over time. What started as a promising collaboration may face challenges as circumstances shift and goals diverge.

It's essential to have a clear plan in place for navigating these potential conflicts. A well-crafted buy-sell agreement can provide a framework for addressing disagreements and ensuring a smooth exit if necessary.

If you’re like most business owners we work with, by the time you think about hiring someone to support you, you probably already feel pretty stressed and overloaded. Maybe you wish you’d hired someone six months ago!  It’s tricky because hiring someone to help (who you’ll have to train), is often just one more daunting task to business owners who already feel stretched too thin.

Here’s a glimpse of some simple tasks that you can get off your plate immediately to open up more time in your life and business for the things that matter.

Overall, if your business is growing and sales are coming in, you have a feeling that your sales team is performing well. If you’re getting new inquiries, you probably have a sense that your marketing efforts are working. Without a CRM in place, the owner will be mostly leading their salesperson off of how things feel, rather than based on reality. With a CRM, key metrics will be defined that allow leaders to point their teams in the right direction of the actions that lead to new business.

As a business owner you’re all too familiar with the phrase, “Every penny counts.”

You understand what’s at stake. Your payroll numbers are attached to real people: people who sit across from you in the lunchroom, work beside you on challenging projects and celebrate alongside when the Lions win! 

The weight on your shoulders as a business owner can be heavy. Having spent much of my career working alongside business owners like yourself, I know from first hand experience just how much of that weight can be lifted with simple easy to implement tools like a zero-based budget. 

Every business has a story. And some of the most heroic stories involve the numbers. All of these numbers add up to the story of your business. When it comes time to exit your business, this story is a key component of success. The story of how you got the business to where it is and a picture painted of where it can go are vital to a successful process.

Do you ever feel like a hamster frantically running around a cage? You're doing all kinds of tasks from sunup to sundown, but at the end of the day, you feel like you’ve made absolutely zero progress. Are you Bill Murray living in Groundhog Day? Is it a new day, but the same old problems? If this sounds like your daily reality, this article is for you. While it may sound counterintuitive, I’ve found that the best way to speed up in life is to first slow down.

Being a business owner is an intense and unique experience, filled with both triumphs and challenges. As you consider exiting your business, it’s crucial to address the emotional side of this transition. Discover strategies for managing your feelings, envisioning your future, and finding support during this significant life change.

As a Baby Boomer business owner, you suddenly find yourself facing decisions that once seemed impossibly far down the road. You probably never sat down and proactively planned your own exit from the company you worked so hard to create. Too many baby boomer business owners are losing out on millions in potential exit proceeds from being well prepared to sell.

Whether we believe it or not, we are all creative at heart. We are all capable of creating things that are unique to who we are and what we love to do.

What does a book about the battles of the creative process have to do with my company?

Innovation. Ambition. Passion. Vision. Perseverance.

All words that accurately describe the entrepreneurial spirit and the business owners we encounter on a daily basis.

Personally, I find the perseverance of business owners to be the most impressive trait, as well as the most valuable asset to their success.

What it takes to become great in this world is a willingness to continue when the going gets tough. And to keep going, when it gets tougher.

We speak with so many owners that have found themselves in situations where the way forward was incredibly uncertain.

Maybe you relate?

I’ve watched some business owners become comfortable with what they’ve built and become complacent and uninspired.

If you can find ways to continue to stretch your mind, body, and spirit, it will translate into every facet of your life.

Sometimes the best way to feel alive and to stimulate creativity and what makes us human is to feel a little scared. When we sense that risk, it brings a focus that is often lost in the distraction of our technology-infused world.

And so my challenge to you is…

At Doescher Group, we have two main client paths: Exit and Evolve.

As a business owner, you will one day exit your business. We are ready to walk you through this process every step of the way.

On the other hand, along the road to the eventual exit of your business, it will inevitably evolve as you work to meet customer needs and build value for yourself and your employees.

Regardless of which path of our Provey Process you start down, everything begins with building a relationship through Discovery.

Perhaps our biggest takeaway is a shift from Boomer owners who often have a singular passion for their business to Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z who often see their business as one of many life passions.

What could this generational shift in private business ownership mean for your business?

How prepared are you for the future state of your business? How ready is your business to transfer to a new owner? Regardless of the option that best suits you and your business, you’ll likely need to spend a lot of time seeking out information and guidance on the process. When the initial study was done in 2013, less than 40% of all owners surveyed said that they had an understanding of their exit options. In 2023, that number rose to 70%.

Many of the brightest visionaries and business owners I know have gotten to where they are on pure grit, intuition, and hard work. However, the time comes when they are ready to reach even higher heights, and leveraging data into information can supercharge the journey. 

Shifting from collecting under explored data to arming you and your business with this predictive information empowers you to tweak your business operations in real-time rather than waiting for next month to see your financial results or worse yet never doing this analysis in the first place.

You’ve accomplished everything you set out to do; probably more. Now you’re ready to exit the business you’ve built from the ground up,

After reviewing your options, you’ve determined the best decision is to run a formal sale process to fetch the best offer for your company. Under this scenario, for a variety of reasons more than ever before, your most likely buyer will be a “financial buyer”. Let me tell you who this buyer is, and what they are looking for in your business.