9 Simple Steps To Make Your Small Business Sellable

When you own a business, it’s guaranteed that one day you will leave it. Whether that be through choice or not, it will happen.

Getting your business exit-ready means that when you do leave, you can get paid well for it, and it can carry on.

That’s good for you for obvious reasons but also good for your team and customers because it carries on.

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in; you can set your business up so it’s sellable. In most cases, it’s going to take about two years to transition a business from being hard-to-sell and owner-dependent to a ready-to-sell, systemised asset.

So, the best time to start thinking about getting your business ready for sale is now. Here are 10 things you can focus on to dramatically increase the saleability and value of your business:

1 - Strong Leadership Team:
When a business is dependent on the owner, it can still be sold, but it will be sold way below its potential value and with unfavourable conditions.

Think about it—if it’s clear to the buyer that as soon as you leave the business stops working, it’s not a good deal for them.

They’ll mitigate the risk by including a clause in the deal that means you have to stay in the business for a specified amount of months/years to earn your cash.

Alternatively, they may just buy access to your clients, which means the amount you’re offered is going to be way below what your business could really be worth—and all of your staff will lose their jobs.

You prevent this by replacing yourself with a strong leadership team. You empower that leadership team by systemising what’s in your head. This isn’t as hard as you might think; essentially, it involves a vision, mission, and values.

The set-up of your leadership team will be unique to your business, but you can take guidance from corporate structures. You’ll typically have a CEO who drives the strategy and a COO who drives delivery/client relations.

You’ll also need people in place to take care of Finance, HR, and Marketing, but it’s becoming more common for these roles to be outsourced or handled by non-leadership roles in small businesses.

The actual structure of your leadership team will depend on your industry and business size, but the key question is—can the business continue to run and grow (in the right direction) without your constant oversight?

If the answer isn’t ‘yes’ right now, no stress, but start obsessing about that question from today.

2 - Client Dependency:
Is your business over-reliant on a few customers? The general rule of thumb here is if 80% of your income comes from one client, it’s hard to sell.

This makes complete sense from a buyer’s perspective. You could have a couple of high-paying clients from your network or previous relationships. While they might be good for income, they’re not good from an investor safety perspective.

Relying on a few clients makes your business high risk. It’s what investors would call non-diversified.

So, take a look at your client list versus your income. Are you over-reliant on a few? If you are, no stress. What can you start doing today to get more clients? How can you diversify?

This leads us neatly on to the next point.

3 - Proven Process For Client Acquisition:
Lots—and I mean lots—of businesses are owned by great operators. That is, people who are great at delivery or service.

It makes sense. If you’re great at what you do and passionate about your industry, it’s a natural step to go into your own business.

But a good business isn’t just a business that delivers the best service or product. It would be great if we could grow businesses on quality of service alone. Good service/product is, of course, good for marketing, but you can’t rely on that alone to grow your business.

It’s a hard and often slow lesson for many business owners to learn that they have to put as much focus on marketing as they do on delivery.

A buyer is going to be more interested in your business if it has a proven method for attracting and converting new clients. This doesn’t have to be complex, but it has to be present.

Do you track how many leads and sales you get each month? Do you have a systemised sales process in place? If you don’t, you already know what I’m going to say—start thinking about and building it today.

The truth is you probably already have a process for this; it just hasn’t been captured. So, don’t overcomplicate it. Start by looking at your current clients and what’s worked in the past. From there, you can start building out your process over the next few months.

4 - Key Team Member Dependency:
Is there any person in your business who, if they left, would cripple your business?

If so, that’s a massive red flag to a buyer or investor—and a stress for you.

What this shows is a lack of systems. The way you fix this is straightforward.

Everyone in your business should have a role description—which can change over time. Linked to that role description should be 1–3 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Linked to those KPIs should be processes that show how they are achieved.

When you apply structure like this, systems and processes evolve organically. The problem for most small businesses is there’s a lack of clarity around who’s doing what and what is expected of whom.

As people are generally decent, everyone in the team picks things up to make the business work. While this is good for making the show run, in the long term, it’s a lose/lose.

It’s a lose/lose because you, the owner, don’t fully understand how the show is running, and people in your team are doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing and probably aren’t getting paid for.

Taking regular time to step back, think about KPIs, and understand who is doing what turns your business into a process-driven enterprise and prevents key person dependency.

5 - Operating Systems:
Similar to our last point with people, are your business processes easy to understand through systems?

We tend to overcomplicate this because we’re so close to what we do.

I used to own a functional fitness facility and struggled to see the systems behind what we did. “It’s too complicated to systemise,” I would tell myself.

Looking back now, objectively, I can see the processes clearly:

Marketing system: Social media, ads, and local outreach
Sales process: One-to-one facility tour, 5-point sales conversation, 3 membership options
Onboarding: One-to-one session, movement assessment, app set-up, goal setting
Team development: Quarterly review, weekly training
Session delivery: Whiteboard delivery, warm-up process, skill, workout
And more. You don’t need anything fancy here, but you want to make the way your business runs simple and easy to understand.

I was with a group of business investors on a weekend workshop, and one of them said something that stuck with me: “I never buy a business I can’t understand quickly.”

Whatever industry you’re in, start thinking about how you can make what you do simpler through systems. It’s easier than you think, and once you get going, it’s enjoyable.

This will also increase the efficiency of your business and the effectiveness of your team.

6 - Client Retention & Reputation:
How long do your clients stay with you?
Have you got positive reviews online?
What’s your customer NPS?

This is the ultimate indicator of your level of service and product-market fit. Are you selling a thing that there is demand for? Are you doing it well?

If you’ve got happy clients, even if your marketing isn’t good, your business can still be attractive to a buyer.

Again, if you’re like most owners who are more focused on operations than marketing, you need to start thinking about this now.

How can you boast more about how happy your clients are? Are you collecting testimonials? Are you asking for reviews on Google and other sites? Are you surveying your clients and asking for feedback regularly?

A client of ours has 750* reviews on Google because he does a good job and is good at asking for reviews. That makes his business attractive to a buyer straight away.

So, ask yourself, are you holding on to your clients, and if so, how are you making it easy for prospective clients and future buyers to see how great a job you’re doing?

7 - Employee Retention:
Do your employees like working for you, and are they sticking around?

People who buy businesses don’t want to work in the businesses they buy. They want to buy something that generates a return on their investment with as little time and effort as possible from them.

A happy, stable team gives your future buyer peace of mind that they’re going to get that. A disgruntled team or a team with high turnover doesn’t.

An easy way to measure this is through a quarterly survey to your team that asks, on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy they are working for you, whether they intend to be there in a year, and what can be done to make working there better.

Doing that quarterly and having that data will put you ahead of 90% of other small businesses when it comes to employee engagement and retention. Easy.

8 - Growth Trend:
What’s the growth trend been in your business over the last 12 months?

Things buyers are going to look at here are:

Number of clients
Revenue
Profit
It’s important you’re tracking these things at least monthly as an owner. Ideally, you and your leadership team are analysing these numbers monthly.

You don’t need fancy software or a complex system. Start with a Google sheet or whiteboard.

My partner lost over a stone in the last 6 weeks. She knows loads about diet and trains regularly but hadn’t been losing weight for a year. What did she change? She started tracking her weight weekly.

The same will work in your business. Normalise the reviewing of these numbers on a monthly or weekly basis with your leadership team, and watch them all improve.

9 - Cash Flow:
Ultimately, it all comes down to cash flow. Can your business consistently generate cash without you, the owner, having to be there?

If the answer is yes, it’s attractive to a buyer. If the answer is no, it’s not.

You’ve got to be a bit savvy to measure, track, and improve your cash flow, but again, it’s not rocket science. If you hate spreadsheets and numbers, then it’s important you’ve got someone helping you with this—and you need this anyway to sell your business.

Summary:
Selling your business is more of a mindset shift than anything else. On average, 300,000 UK businesses are closed without selling every year, and 80% of all businesses listed for sale never sell.

That’s not because it’s hard to sell a business; it’s because owners don’t adopt the right mindset.

I want you to stop thinking about yourself as an employee in your business from this day forward.

Start thinking of yourself as the seller of your business. Your role isn’t to put out fires or work in the business anymore.

Your role is to get your business ready for sale. By taking on this role, you are securing the future of your business, the future employment of your team, and the future availability of your product or service to your customers.

​If you know implementing these steps is right for your business but the very thought of it stresses you out, book a call with my team via the button below to find out how we can help you.
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​We never pressure or guilt trip you into buying on our calls. Our sales process is to genuinely help you get clarity and help so that if you do choose to partner with someone you'll consider us.