4 PR Tips to Consider Before You Sell Your Business
This post coming–once again–from a reaction to John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing Blog, where Jantsch interviews author John Warrillow (who has written Built to Sell) posits that your business is worthless if it “depends on you.” Obviously, Mr. Warrillow is approaching this from the point of view of someone who looks to develop businesses that will be sold, along the road, as their principle money maker for the owner and founder of the business. I’d take exception to some of his points; I don’t think that you need to plan for your business to 1) employ people after you’re done with it or even 2) employ you forever. The simple fact’s that, over a 5 year period, most small businesses are going to go belly-up anyway. It’s part of the nature of owning a small business. That doesn’t make it worthless. If you’ve gotten along in your business, helped out other businesses or organizations, and paid your bills for the duration of the run, I’d say you did pretty well. If you’re looking to turn a one-man shop into a national (or multinational!) empire, I’d say having an exit plan in mind is probably a good idea, then. Especially if you’re looking to take the company public, since investors are much happier when they’re putting money in a business that doesn’t depend on one person to run.
So why is a PR Blog writing about this? If you intend to run your business such that it can be sold off one day and still operate as well as it ever did, there are some public relations implications that you need to consider. Let’s list ‘em:
- Consider Your Brand’s “Face”: It’s ironic that John Warrilow is writing about the necessity of building a business that you can sell on a blog like Duct Tape Marketing, because John Jantsch is so tied up in that business that it’s impossible to think of DTM without him. If your brand’s “face” is you, the owner, then when you leave, the company’s going to suffer. Put your strength behind your brand instead of putting it behind yourself.
- Consider Your Brand’s Culture: Small, quirky, and plucky work well for any number of companies, including some of my favorites; if that culture is a big attraction to your clients, your sale just got a lot harder, not just because fewer people want to buy businesses run in a “quirky” fashion, but also because you will quickly find that your business customers realize when they aren’t getting the same experience that they had been.
- Consider Your Brand’s Presence: I counsel my clients to follow a social media regimen that’s roughly 30 minutes a day (Here’s a breakdown of my recommended daily social media workout). If you’re doing anything like that yourself, you can bet that suddenly vanishing off the social media space will alienate a sector of your customers. If you’re managing your brand’s social media presence, you’d better have good documentation on what it is that you do so that you can pass that along to the next guy.
- Consider Your Business’s Customers: What happens to them? While you might not care too much what happens to the customers of a business that you no longer own, having a string of companies that stop servicing customers once you’ve sold ‘em will eventually catch up to you. Further, it’s going to impact your ability to sell your business, if your model’s sustainable for someone else or not.
All of these relate to how your business’s public policy decisions influence your ability to sell it and move on, so think about those things if you pick up a copy of “Built to Sell” in the future.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=9ec7ecd5-1f95-4be9-baa6-7a5b913a8a90)

![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=01cf2e32-eb12-4813-9421-c97e12cc05f2)

