Brian Tracy said “ Failing to plan means planning to fail”
In the mad rush to increase turnover in the run up to a sale, the very essence of the business is often ignored – its raison d’etre: The bottom line and the sustainability thereof.
The formula seems simple: Raise the sales, cut the expenses any way you can, show a magnificent profit; sell to some greedy purchaser.
Unfortunately it is not this simple for a number of reasons.
- Good quality business buyers and investors always make their agreements of sale subject to a suspensive condition of sale (or condition precedent) in which they require to be satisfied as to the state of the financials as well as satisfactory answers to a lengthy due diligence questionnaire which they will have formulated over several years. During this process they will look for sustainability.
- Businesses do not always sell quickly. In fact very often they take a long time to be sold, and during that period they will need to be sustained themselves, for themselves. There is no clause which allows a business to deteriorate during the due diligence and financing phases but which still locks in the purchaser. (Well I suppose there is, but you’ll struggle to get a buyer to sign it.)
- Businesses need to grow, but at the same time remain sustainable and fundable. Uncontrolled growth sucks up cash flow better than any super sopper mopper you have ever seen. With an impending sale looming, quick last minute growth will sound the death knell for most sellers.
As with so many things of any value in life, businesses need to grow in value in a well structured and planned way which takes time and patience, and they need to have the following elements in place:
- Sales, margins and profits
- Infrastructure
- Intellectual property
- Sustainability
- Balance sheet
Sacrificing margin to grow sales helps nobody but the psychologists. Raising sales through good marketing efforts while maintaining margin is great. Great that is, as long as your infrastructure is in place to sustain the delivery to customers. But very often, the infrastructure spend bites into the profit line. Worse than that, spending on more staff and the delegation of responsibilities can also bite into the intellectual property of a business, and where the barrier to entry is very low, even bigger problems can arise.
Strangling a business through ensuring sustainability without pushing the risks a bit will ensure that you have a boring stagnating venture that you wish to sell, if only to stop the boredom.
Planning makes the difference.
Just as planning for the sale of a business will make an enormous difference to your life when the sale happens, so planning the growth of the business beyond just adding sales to the top line will allow the business to grow in a controlled manner rather than in fits and starts of feast followed by cash flow crisis. Your added sales may bolster your cash flow initially, but where will your inventory come from, and who will finance it, pack it and ship it? Who will provide the extra after sales service and explain to the greater number of customers how the widgets work? How will you collect the money, account for it and bank it? And how will you survive in the meantime?
Working through bottle necks in advance will not only save you a lot of grey hair, but will also add value to the business long before you have to, or want to sell it. Of course the added benefit is that you get to enjoy stronger cash flows while you still own the business.