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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

If you’re frustrated about scaling beyond what you can personally do or wanting to take a vacation without worrying about the plant burning down while you’re gone, or simply want to leave at 3 to coach your child’s sports team? How do you build a team that shoulders the load with the same discipline and accountability that you bring to the table?

Running a business is a wholly immersive experience, where each and every day presents new challenges and obstacles to overcome. As a business owner, you often develop tunnel vision, focusing solely on internal operations. But at certain moments you may be forced to reckon with external factors, like presidential elections.

You know the days where you’re constantly spinning your wheels? By the end of the day nothing is solved, but you’re exhausted. Your “issues” pile keeps growing as problems are coming in faster than you can find solutions. The brute force method worked when you started your business. But two things have happened. Your business has grown and you’ve gotten older. You cannot keep up the pace anymore. And you’ve earned the right to slow down and enjoy what you’ve built.

The answer is simple, and even a little boring – Systems.

Where you sit today, exiting your business may be a far off thought, but it’s important to see that one day it will be a reality. Even if your exit is 20 or 30 years away, there are things you can do today that will radically increase the value of your business in the here and now, and when it’s time to exit.

2020 hit you like a freight train. The slow leak of the last decade became a gusher, and the labor pool completely dried up. Nobody wanted to work. You’ve raised wages, you’ve made jobs more flexible, you’ve offered more benefits, signing bonuses … You name it, you’ve tried it. Two years later, you feel like you’ve made no progress at all.

Your labor challenges have burned you out and you’re ready to be done with all of this. What do you do?

You may be like most business owners. Your business is your passion and hobby. Sure, you enjoy R&R. You like golf and travel, but you feel most alive at the helm of your business, not on a yacht in the islands.

But if you want to find your next act, you’re going to need to do some self examination to figure this out. If golf and travel do not sound like an enticing retirement, you will want to find something that is.

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 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?

Net Working Capital (“NWC”) is the metaphorical grease that keeps the machinery of your enterprise churning out sales and profits. Yet it is often misunderstood and/or underestimated, especially in growing businesses.

People often joke about how “you have to spend money to make money”. This phrase is often used in the context of capital investments in land, property, plant, and equipment necessary to bring a project from concept to reality. While it’s true that every business requires capital expenditures, the attention afforded to big ticket items like machinery and equipment can result in losing sight of NWC which is necessary to assure the machinery can be run.

When it comes to the sale of your business, the most prized assets are the ones that have the highest potential to generate recurring future cash flow for the new owners. So the key to a successful business sale is not historical or present cash flow, but transferable future cash flow.