How to Sell Your Business Like a Buyer
Your company is the product. Growth to Exit is the process. The Buyer is your customer.
When you own your company, you are the expert in how to run it. But the expertise that it takes to operate a successful business will not help you sell it. You have to shift your mindset from an Owner to a Growth to Exit Seller.
THE GROWTH TO EXIT COURSE WALKS YOU THROUGH THE STAGES OF SELLING YOUR BUSINESS AND UNDERSTANDING THE VALUATION OF YOUR COMPANY
As a business owner, you understand your business, your market and your customers. Profitability and growth are the driving forces in the decisions you make. After taking the Growth to Exit course, your mindset has shifted. You understand the value of your business, because you looked at it from a buyer's perspective. The Growth to Exit strategies and tools help you transform your business into a product that attracts serious buyers.
Understand the Value of Your Business
Buyer and sellers are in competition for the price paid for your company. When you don't evaluate your company from a buyer's perspective, it is vulnerable to being devalued, degraded and discounted.
How to Plan A Successful Exit.
Preparing your company to sell is a process, not an event. When you use the Growth to Exit process and apply it to your business, you will discover those hidden areas that buyers scrutinize and evaluate. After you improve those critical areas of your company, the price goes up the less that the buyer has to fix.
How do you get started with Growth to Exit?
Step 1: Buy Growth To Exit
Jim Shields, lawyer and businessman, guides you through 12 lessons. Each lesson highlights what buyers look for inside a company, and suggestions on how to uplevel those areas. Worksheets are the tools that guide you through the GTE process.
Step 2: Implement GTE Strategies
Growth to Exit provides step-by-step actions and strategies that you can implement inside your company. You are in control of grooming your company for sale, and that makes all the difference.
Step 3: Sell with Confidence
After implementing Growth to Exit inside your company, you have taken away the deficiencies buyers look for to reduce the price. Your confidence and knowledge at the negotiating table result in a higher price for your life's work.
Meet Your Growth to Exit Guide
An Expert Who Has Sat On Both Sides of the Negotiating Table
Welcome to Growth to Exit™ – How to Sell Your Company Like a Buyer.
My name is Jim Shields, and I want to help you sell your company.
I created the Growth to Exit™ process in 2015 and have successfully taken hundreds of companies through these steps. The enterprise value these companies received after going through the Growth to Exit™ process was substantial higher than if the company was sold before Growth to Exit™.
Growth to Exit™ can help you prepare your company to sell in the marketplace.
Testimonials
"His uniqueness is that he’s not only an attorney but he’s also a businessman. Jim has helped me understand my role as a President/CEO is to keep the overall health of my company in good standing. One of the things that attracted me to Jim is his integrity. I have felt that everyone in Shields Legal Group embodies that same philosophy, and that’s worth more than millions of dollars."
Julie Faling
President of HCFS, Inc.
"Jim does two things well. He’s a great lawyer and also a great businessman. He is a unique lawyers that can combine both the legal side and the business side. If someone is looking for an attorney, Jim is someone that can give you solid advice but also business advice. I’ve been contact with a lot of attorneys, but they don’t have a good in depth understanding or what it takes to run a business."
Joe Colaruotolo
The Redden Group
"I think Jim cares greatly about business and personal financial success, but he cares just as much about others being successful, especially young people with drive and integrity. What is unique about Jim is his ability to understand your business and his objectivity. You immediately begin thinking that Jim is a part of “we”. He’s not a vendor, he’s not even a partner. He’s part of who you are."
John Pappanastos
President at EFG Companies
Topics covered in the Growth to Exit Course:
Module 1 – Assessment & Goal Setting
The purpose of Module 1 is to have you assess your company’s salability, determine the market value, and pull back the curtain on what it takes to prepare your company for sale.
Module 2 – Talk to a “Realtor”
When you decide to sell your house, one of the first things you do is ask a realtor to run a market analysis of your property. The condition of the home, appearance and location all play a role in the valuation. Based on historical sales data, as well as their own expertise, a competent real estate agent can provide you with a realistic evaluation. Selling a business is no different.
Module 3 – Are You Ready to Sell?
At this point in the course, you should have an idea of the complications and considerations involved in selling your business. But you also need to consider why you want to sell and how it will affect your live and those around you.
Module 4 – Five Critical Areas
There are five major areas of every company that buyers scrutinize. Legal, Finance, Human Capital, Sales/Marketing and IT Systems. Let’s take a look inside each area and identify the specifics.
Module 5 – Status of your Legal House
When selling your business, one of your considerations will be to look at your best practices inside conflict and risk management.
Module 6 – Status of your Financial House
Buyers are trying to predict future performance of the company. Proper financial reporting is critical. Financial reporting to operate a company is not the same type of reporting necessary to sell a company.
Module 7 – Status of your Human Capital
When key employees leave the company, are your sales territories and proprietary information protected from a legal standpoint?
Module 8 – Status of Sales/Marketing/Brand
Do you have a solid growth plan in place that is documented and implemented? Any future plans you have for the growth of the company should be memorialized in a detailed business plan. Include financial projections that are realistic and based on historical data.
Module 9 – Status of IT Systems
IT Systems are scrutinized by a potential buyer and always need attention in securing data, a proper audit, and recovery plans.
Module 10 – Game Time
It is time to place your business in the marketplace and take the steps in preparing to deal with buyers.
Module 11 – The Negotiation
There are three types of buyers. It’s important to know the type of buyer who is interested in your company, because each buyer presents different perspectives and motivations.
Module 12 – The close and your new identity
Now you need to decide what to do with your money from the sale of your business and understand how to find your new identity.
AS A REMINDER
Depending on your tax bracket, this purchase could be tax deductible.
