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.

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.

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.

Lately though, you’ve been turning your attention to some bigger questions. The status quo isn’t working for you anymore and you’d like to shake things up. You keep posing a question to yourself, “Should I grow this thing? Or should I sell the company and move on?” You’re just not sure, but you know it requires some exploration. Putting your head in the sand will only hold off the inevitable for so long.

When it comes to these questions, you need a different skill set from your current internal capabilities. Navigating through these waters is much different from your day-to-day accounting and finance processes. It might be time to think about a Transactional CTO.

After reviewing your exit options, you also decided to sell to the highest bidder. You feel the release of this decision to sell. Now what do you do?

Do you put up a for sale sign on the front lawn? Do you put an ad in the newspaper? Do you create a website? Of course not. In order to get the best offer, you’re going to need to engage an investment banker who specializes in the sale of businesses like yours.

Chances are you’ve never engaged an investment banker before now. Most people haven’t. Here’s what you need to know.

It’s your business and you’ve always managed it this way. You’ve gotten a certain glee out of minimizing your income taxes. Over the years you’ve employed two common “strategies'' of closely held business owners: under-reporting cash sales and classifying personal expenses as business expenses.

While these actions are illegal under US law, you’ve dealt with that moral conflict long ago in your head. Either way, this piece is not about the legal, ethical, or moral questions of such strategies. Let’s instead discuss how these strategies may impact your exit plan.

Most of your advisers are the original gang despite the changed scope, scale, and complexity of your personal and business needs. Whenever your controller and others have expressed concerns in the past, you have played the loyalty card and said, “These are the advisers who got me here.” While this is somewhat true, you know they may not be the right group to take you where you are headed.

You’ve heard it said that “words matter”. As a business owner you might be surprised about how words can attract or repel potential buyers for your business. Let’s take a look at a few real world examples to get a sense of what we mean.

While purchase price is an important factor, and often the most important, it is not the only factor to consider. An offer is only just that, an offer. It is not a closed deal. To get to a closed deal, you should also consider offer terms and certainty to close, in addition to price.

Do you continue to feel aligned in your mission? Or has life intervened and little-by-little (or all at once), as it inevitably does, have you become increasingly aware that your shared vision diverged somewhere along the way?

This common occurrence, which can be painfully obvious to observers, often goes unaddressed for months or even years amongst business partners. While ignorance may seem like bliss, it can often do real damage to your bottom line, limiting your exit options, one avoided conversation at a time.

There are other options. Let’s discuss some healthier ways to handle such a situation.

You’ve built an incredible and vastly complex business from your humble beginnings. You worked hard and allowed yourself to learn from every mistake. You’re a lot smarter about a lot of things. But deep down you know your limits. You know you cannot be the expert in everything. You know you need some professional assistance, but you cannot forget how you got burned back in the day.

What do you do now?

For the past year or more, you’ve realized that your organization has no effective expense control. You simply cannot approve every expenditure anymore without suffocating your business. On the other hand without written policies it seems that every month you get hit with an unexpected spending surprise. There must be a happy medium, right?

You’ve got your anxiety about the inevitable: your exit from your company. You’ve heard a few stories and you know that selling your company is just as competitive as making a buck in your industry.

In your day-to-day business, you know the market and you’ve played the game for decades. But in the market for the buying and selling of businesses, you know it’s an unfair fight. You know that someday soon you’re going to need to step into the ring.

As an entrepreneur, you can see the future. Where others see an open field, you see a beautiful state-of-the-art facility churning out new products. Where others see an empty shell building, you envision an automated line that will cut operating costs in half. Where others see an abandoned storefront, you see a new retail concept.

You speak the language of a business operator.

But as you know, sometimes you need a financial partner in order to bring your future vision into reality.