There are a number of reasons why you might not be able to sell your business today, or for 3x its current worth in the near future.

Let’s take them one at a time. For starters, most businesses are experiencing one of the following issues at any given time:

Cash Flow issues, staffing issues, family or generational issues, and succession planning issues.

Diving a little bit deeper, we see these core problems manifest themselves in many ways. It can look like slow / flat or declining sales, or a business that is too dependent on the owner.

For example, in serving custom manufacturing, industrial services, and the supply chain industry, we often see that the owner has been the primary rain maker for 20-30 years, and they often hold out as a point of pride that they’ve never had to market.

In these situations, we often see client concentration risk, where the top 2-3 customers make up 40% or more of total sales. This problem alone, left unaddressed, shaves 7 to 8 figures of value off of most businesses that we encounter.

Other common issues we see that keep your business from selling for all it’s worth is the inability to show historical data (choose your acronym: KPI’s, Key Numbers, OKR’s, Metrics). Even further, if that historical data isn’t telling the story of a non-owner dependent, growth curve, you’re leaving most of your value on the table.

Other clues to a business that won’t sell for what it’s worth today include not having sales infrastructure, not having a sales system, missing documentation around sales processes, and ineffective sales management and team.

The problems created from all of the above end up with the owner either being forced to sell for “pennies on the dollar”, working well past their desired date, or simply having to walk away from their life’s work.

Exitology exists to fix that. We help you build a business that’s scalable, transferrable, and worth what it should be.