Is your business healthy and interesting enough 
to attract an investor and / or buyer to take a “leap of faith" on it?
As in funding / buying it at a price well beyond what its historic “proof” - customers, revenues, cash flows - might reasonably justify?
The hard reality, for most businesses, is that this is just never going to happen.
The equally hard reality is that, again for most businesses, that this is an unfixable problem. Unfixable for reasons including:
- Lack of scalability to their business models (see most, but by no means all service businesses) or non-existent / de minimis brands, intellectual property, trade secrets, etc.
- They compete in industries in long-term decline, usually because of technology advances (see retail, newspapers, commercial printing, desktop computing, cable television, et al.).
- And my overlooked favorite, their management lacks the “right stuff” - talent, training, work ethic - to ever fix the business problems "of consequence."
Now, I'll get to some options for unfixable businesses in a moment.
But let’s first look at the other side, those “chosen few” companies that opposed to being unfixable have the wind at their backs and oysters at their feet!
These businesses have the "good stuff" going on - growing revenues, healthy margins, next gen technology, cool brands, charismatic leadership - and their main stress is just to decide which of the plentiful, high potential opportunities to pursue.
For these businesses, there are investors and buyers everywhere that are excited to take big leaps of faith and offer them money to grow and / or sell.
And as I talked about on my “Maximizing Business Value in the Trump Economy” webinar last week, with business and consumer confidence soaring now is one of the best times ever to reach out to them.
With that happy aside, what are those folks at businesses that just feel “unfixable” to do?
Well, the cold truth is that they most likely need to either:
1. Try to sell themselves to a “strategic” buyer - someone to come in and either a) replace tired management with new blood and / or b) exploit “synergies” such as combining a business with strong marketing with one with great products / services or finding efficiencies through reducing redundancies, admin, etc.
2. Just accept that the business just can’t be sold nor fundamentally grown. And then like heck work to just suck as much money out of it as possible before its inevitable demise.
And oh, if there is just not enough money in that unfixable business to make it worth it to keep doing at all?
Well then let's shut it down, cry in our soup for perhaps even more than a little bit, and then move on to that next bigger and far better thing.
So if you are one of the chosen ones, or very much believe that you might be, then go for it full force.
And do so now when conditions are hot like this. Investors and buyers are wanting and waiting to take that chance and leap of faith!
And if you’re not, that is ok too.
Because yes in this 21st Century World of ours, there are a million ways to go.
One of those ways might be to sell the business, another to run it as absolutely best you can as profitably as you can.
It is just always very good to know what you are - and what you're not.
And to then plan accordingly.