To build a successful company you have to be clear about your aims. Have you set up this company in order to employ yourself? or are you serious about creating a valuable company which eventually you can sell at a profit?
If ultimately you would like to sell on your business, you need to create a set of income streams that can be valued or sold off independently. This means having an idea of who might buy the business and how to generate some operations that turn out profits whether you are involved on a day to day basis or not.
Michael Gerber in the e-Myth states that you should work on the business, not in the business. He recommends you plan the business from day one as a franchise – whether you intend to franchise it or not. This is because your systems are one of the 4 areas where intangible value – what we used to call goodwill – lives.
Intangible value is what prospective buyers look for – the forecast income that depends on
We have developed a set of learning materials to help you look at this systematically – work out what you should be doing, what you should be measuring, how you get at it and how you compare with the UK’s best small businesses. There are 8 half day sessions + two 1 to 1 sessions to equip you to take your business to the next rung. They are run with a set of 6 peers who support each other in their learning. The cost of the programme is £2000 but if you are London based and employ more than 20 people, Business Link for London may pay half the cost.
The programme as a whole is in 2 parts. One deals with the issues of thinking, feeling and managing conflict and then covers the marketing issues covered in "Refocus Your Business". The others cover an understanding of how businesses grow, how to choose partners and work in the networked economy, how to develop new products and markets, how to motivate your top team and how to measure your progress towards your exit strategy using a simple but effective balanced scorecard approach.
If you would like to take part use the buttons on the right of the page - you may also be interested in downloading some free white papers - they are listed to the right.