A client of mine went looking for an acquisition last year and found a good one. The target sold services his own clients were already asking for, so buying it wouldn't have added the two companies together, it would have multiplied them. The numbers worked. He made an offer.
Then his team went in properly, and found that the business didn't really exist without its owner. He held the client relationships. He made every decision worth making. What the company knew, he knew, and none of it had ever been written down.
So the offer was revised. Not trimmed. It came down to a quarter of what had first been put on the table, because a quarter was what remained once you took the owner out of it.
The seller was insulted and pulled out, which I understand. He'd built something real over a long career and he was being told it was worth a fraction of what he thought. What he couldn't see was that the buyer wasn't being difficult. He was pricing what he would actually own on day one, which was a business about to lose the only person capable of running it.
My client bought something else. The seller is still looking. He's 72.
And that business was fixable. A year or two of deliberate work and it would have been worth close to the original offer. Nobody had ever told him that his own indispensability was the thing standing between him and his retirement.
So let's say it plainly, because most owners never confront it. If your business doesn't work without you, the best case is that it comes off the price. The worst case is that nobody wants it at all.
You don't have to want to sell
You might have no intention of selling. You might plan to hand it to your daughter, hold it another fifteen years, or never give it a moment's thought. None of that is an argument against being ready.
Illness happens. Offers arrive unannounced. Business partners fall out. People change their minds, usually later than they expected to. The work that makes a business sellable is the same work that makes it survivable, and you want it done before you find out which of the two you needed.
And if none of it ever happens, you're left owning a business that doesn't require you to be there. That isn't a consolation prize. That's the thing everybody says they want when they start.
The month test
Here's the question I put to owners.
If you went away for a month, completely uncontactable, what would you come back to? A business that had run into real trouble, one that had carried on steadily, or one that had grown?
Most people answer that faster than they should. Sit with it, because the honest answer tells you what you've built. Trouble shows you exactly where the work is. Steady is a decent result and it's where most good businesses land. Growth means you own a business rather than a job.
What only exists in your head
Then ask yourself what would leave the building with you.
The client whose managing director has your mobile number and uses it. The reason that customer has the terms they have. Which supplier will move a deadline, and which one will agree to it and then let you down.
None of that is written anywhere and none of it passes to anybody else on its own. It looks like an asset from the inside, and it vanishes the moment you're not there to be asked.
Fixing it is simple enough, it just isn't quick. Take a manager to the meetings you'd normally take on your own. Let them run the call while you sit and listen. Introduce the client to whoever will look after them next, while you're still around to make it feel like an upgrade.
If only one person can do it, it isn't a process
This is where systems come in, and they are the whole game.
It's worth being clear about the words, because they get used loosely. A process, or SOP, is the series of steps that gets something done accurately and repeatably, every time. A system is what holds those processes together and makes sure they're actually used.
You are not the person to write them. Your team are far closer to every one of those steps than you are. They create the processes, and they build the system that manages them. Your part in that is leadership, not micromanagement. Set the expectation, give them the time, then leave the detail to the people who know it.
Because if something only works when one particular person is there to do it, you haven't got a process. You've got that person.
Get started!
Get your senior team together and ask them to imagine you're going away for a couple of months. Not a plan, not a date. Just picture it.
Then be straight with them. You've allowed yourself to become too involved in too much. That's your doing rather than theirs, and you'd hate to watch them struggle with something that was never their fault.
So you're going to sort it out together. Between now and whenever that trip happens, they build the processes and the system to run the business without you in it, and to enjoy doing it. Say that last part out loud, because a team that hears about the boss's absence and nothing else will quietly assume the worst.
Then ask them what they need from you. Their list will be better than anything you'd have written on your own.
One last thing. A colleague of mine, Peter Boolkah, has written a book called Your Business Sucks: Build a Business That Works Without Destroying Your Life. It covers a good deal of what's here, and plenty that isn't. Worth a few evenings of your time.
