Previously published as The Business Value Booster Method, by Douglas M. Brown. This new edition goes beyond just those who are planning to sell their businesses in the near future. It also contains several practical exercises so readers can actually do those steps instead of just reading about what they should do.
You built the business. But how much of the business still depends on you?
Maybe you’re working sixty hours a week and can’t imagine taking a real vacation.
Or maybe things are going pretty well. You have good employees, make decent money, and can get away when you want to. But when something important happens, they still call you. That may be merely annoying today. Someday it may matter a great deal more.
It’s not “just what owners do”. It’s what they do when their businesses own them. Not only does it make your life stressful right now, but it puts your company at risk on a regular basis. And it certainly isn’t why you decided to get into the business.
The Business Value Booster Method is for established small-business owners who want their companies to do a better job of supporting the goals they had for their live, intead of consuming them.
It starts with a Reality Check: What do you actually want from owning this business? Where are you now? And what stands between the two?
From there, you’ll learn a practical way to identify the obstacles that keep a business dependent on its owner, remove the ones that matter most, and make improvements without trying to rebuild the entire company at once.
There are no promises of overnight transformation, no ten secret steps, no 10x transformations.
The test is much more concrete:
Can you leave, and does the business continue to work?
That doesn’t mean an “absentee owner”. It means the owner can absent themselves when they want to, and the business keeps operating.
This isn’t about abandoning the business or a “Four-Hour Workweek”. It means that you can apend your time where it matters most to you, sometimes working on the business, sometimes doing the things you really want to do outside the business.
Along the way, you’ll examine your own goals, workload, financial expectations, owner dependence, business vulnerabilities, processes, staff, and succession readiness. Practical exercises help you apply the ideas to your own company rather than somebody else’s case study.
The Method moves your business towards becoming easier to own, more resilient when life intervenes, and more valuable when you decide to call it a day. Why wouldn’t you do this? Because you plan to get to stuff like that someday, when things aren’t so busy. That Someday will never come. But another one will, one that forces your hand. Will you and the business be ready for that?
Don’t wait for Someday. You don’t usually get to choose that day. Someday chooses you.
Will you be ready?
Get a PDF version here
or get it from Amazon here.