How do you know the right time to sell your company? One answer to this age-old question is that the time to sell is when someone else is willing to invest more in your business than you are.

When you start a business, nobody is willing to invest in its success more than you. You’ve already worked a 40-hour week by Wednesday and, if you’re like most founders, you’ve invested a big chunk of your liquid assets to get your business going.

You’re all in.

In the early days, you are willing to risk your business on a new strategy because the business is pretty much worthless. As the Bob Dylan lyric goes, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

As your business grows and becomes more valuable, you may find yourself becoming more conservative, unwilling to risk the equity you have created inside your business on your next big idea. You have reached a point where someone else may be willing to risk more time and money for your business than you are.

Peach New Media 

David Will is the founder of Peach New Media, which he started back in 2000 as a reseller of web conferencing. In the early days, Will changed his business strategy frequently, trying to find an idea with legs. After a number of pivots, he landed on selling learning management software to associations.

The business grew nicely and by 2015 Peach New Media had 40 employees and then received an attractive acquisition offer from a large private equity company. Will was conflicted. He loved his business and treasured the team he had built. At the same time, the acquirer was offering him a life-changing check.

In the end, Will realized that he had become somewhat more conservative as his business had grown and the potential acquirer was willing to make a big bet on integrating Peach New Media into another one of its acquisitions. Will realized he had reached a point where his appetite for risk in his own business was lower than his potential acquirer’s. Will decided to sell.

When To Sell

The point where a buyer is willing to risk more than you are happens at a different stage for everyone. Let’s say you have a business worth $1 million today. Would you be willing to risk the entire thing on a new strategy for a shot at making it a $10 million company? Many entrepreneurs would take that bet.

Now imagine you have a company worth $10 million and your business represents the bulk of your net worth. Most would argue $10 million is life-changing money. Would you be willing to risk your entire company for a chance to make it a $100 million company? The marginal utility of an extra $90 million is minimal—we all only need so many cars—but the risk is significant. Fewer owners would bet $10 million for a chance at $100 million.

What if your business was worth $100 million? Would you risk it all for a long shot at becoming a billion-dollar company? It is hard to imagine any one person betting $100 million dollars on anything, but if you’re the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation with ambitious growth goals, $100 million is a bet you may be willing to make.

When someone else is willing to invest more in your business than you are, it is probably time your company finds a new owner.

Is now the time to consider selling your business?

Complete the “Value Builder” questionnaire today in just 13 minutes and we’ll send you a 27-page custom report assessing how well your business is positioned for selling. Take the test now:

We get to see a lot of company founders who are contemplating an exit. Some of our customers get lucky early in life, but in the vast majority of examples where a founder is getting a seven- or eight-figure offer, it is not their first rodeo. In fact, most owners have had multiple failures and modest successes before their first big exit.

One of the most compelling reasons to consider selling your business is to give yourself a clean canvass for designing your next business. You can take all of the lessons you’ve learned building your current company and apply them to a new idea.

What would you do with a clean slate?

Michelle Romanow partnered with two friends from her engineering class and together they founded Evandale Caviar in their early 20s. The trio’s idea was to sell caviar to high-end restaurants around the world.

The partners built a fishery and had just started to get the business off the ground by the summer of 2008 when the luxury restaurant industry started to wobble. By fall of that year, high-end restaurants around the world were suffering, and by the end of 2008, the industry was on its knees.

Evandale Caviar failed.

The partners licked their wounds and came together to start a new business, a deal-of-the-day website called Buytopia. They had learned from their Evandale experience and were building a good little business—call it a single, to use a baseball analogy—when the partners started to tinker with a third idea.

From nothing to $25 million in 12 months

Romanow saw big companies wasting millions of dollars printing paper coupons and reasoned that there must be a more efficient way to distribute them. They dreamt up a mobile app that would notify the shoppers in a grocery store of special offers and let them snap a picture of their grocery receipt and receive money back on the products being promoted. The SnapSaves business model was to charge the company advertising its offers through the app.

Romanow and her partners poured more than $100,000 a month of Buytopia cash into SnapSaves, and within six months they had a product they could take to market. They launched SnapSaves in August 2013 and the company was a quick hit with consumers and advertisers. Within a year, the founders were entertaining venture capital investment offers with an implied valuation of around $25 million for their young company.

That’s when Groupon called and said they wanted to buy SnapSaves outright. The partners haggled with Groupon and got them to double their offer in the process. Less than a year after launching SnapSaves, they agreed to be acquired by Groupon.

Third time’s a charm

A casual observer of the SnapSaves story would likely chalk it up to luck: a couple of friends leave school, start a business and become an overnight success. That’s a convenient story, but it’s not true.

SnapSaves would never have happened without the lessons the partners learned from Evandale. And therein lies the secret to many successful entrepreneurs: they got their first few businesses out of the way early in their working lives to make the time, room and capital for a true success.

Is your business creating maximum value?

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By David Coit, VERTESS | April 12, 2017

What drives the value of a business? This is a primary concern for most business owners, whether they’re looking to sell in the short-term or position their company for future success.

Here are six tips for creating company value.

1. Create A Company Succession Plan

Most companies do not have a formal company succession plan. Company succession planning differs from personal or family succession planning, as it focuses on forming the next generation team of key managers and employees in a company.

A company succession plan creates value by:

• helping to ensure the survival and future growth of the company in the event of unforeseen changes in personnel;
• preserving harmony and reduces the chance of repeating mistakes as business owners and senior managers pass-down company specific knowledge;
• maintaining the legacy of owner’s desires, vision, and cultural goals through company-wide assimilation of the owner’s knowledge; and
• providing a framework for best practices as next generation managers bubble-up their ideas for improvement based on hands-on observations.

Company succession planning does not have to be complicated but should include mentoring, employee engagement, open communication, and fairness. Senior managers should not feel as though the company’s plans include replacing existing managers. Instead, company succession planning should be viewed as a process of grooming all employees to take the company to a higher level of performance and growth.

2. Don’t Forget Qualitative Factors

Quantitative factors such as changes in revenues, gross and net margins, operating cost, etc. are easy to identify and therefore easy for owners to focus their attention on. However, companies with above-average valuations excel in both quantitative and qualitative factors. Don’t overlook areas like:

• planning
• leadership
• sales management
• marketing management
• people management
• operations management
• financial management
• legal management

3. Take a Retirement Account Perspective

I’ve run into numerous business owners who say things like, “I’ll worry about the value of my company when I start thinking about an exit strategy.” That’s like waiting until you’re 65 to check the value of your retirement accounts!

Company value creation is an ongoing process, which includes:

• creating or expand recurring revenue streams,
• increasing expected future revenue growth rate,
• increasing returns on existing assets,
• discontinuing poor performing activities,
• reducing non-cash excess working capital,
• creating or expand barriers to entry,
• reducing company specific risk

A value growth professional can help you think about your business as an investor as well as an owner.

4. Protect Existing Value

For most companies, 75% of company value is in its intangibles. Some of those intangibles are trade secrets, intellectual property, proprietary methods and/or software, customer relationships, etc. Business owners should identify key value drivers, then takes steps to protect those key value drivers, which will protect company value.

Most business owners limit their actions to protect company value to obtaining hazard insurance, worker’s compensation insurance, and liability insurance. There are other ways to protect company value, including:

• Obtaining patent protect
• Requiring employees sign intellectual property assignment agreements
• Requiring employees sign non-disclosure and non-compete agreements
• Executing buy-sell agreements will all company owners
• Acquiring life insurance to support buy-sell agreements
• Purchasing business interruption insurance
• Monitoring and taking actions to limit the loss of brand reputation

5. Create Customer Value

The traditional notion of customer value, where benefits minus cost equal customer value, may seem simple but can be much more complicated in practice. Customer benefits and cost can be both direct and indirect, as can be customer value. Moreover, the right set of customer benefits can create barriers to entry and/or competitive advantages.

Many business owners argue that customer value is created by providing consumers with the lowest price, highest quality, and best service. Unfortunately, those three factors are often at odds with one another. Instead, consider adopting a customer-centric approach, taking into account factors like:

• The value drivers of your customers and would-be customers
• What customers feel about your product or service offering/delivery
• The cultural landscape of your target customers
• Your customers’ value proposition determinants
• How you can create a value-added experience for your customers
• When to create value through a collaboration with customers
• Measurements of customer value creation include increasing customer acquisition, satisfaction, retention, and add-on selling. Additionally, companies that can enhance their customer’s perception of the value of their products or services are likely to enjoy higher margins.

6. Plan Ahead

Business owners who don’t plan often find that they spend most of their time putting out fires. Planning allows company owners and managers an opportunity to set proactive goals and objectives for the intermediate future, as well as identify solutions for key business issues. A great starting point for long-term planning is to conduct analyses around issues like:

Why your company is relevant to existing and future customers

• Current market trends in your industry
• Why customers buy from you or don’t
• Current competitors and their competitive advantages
• Your company’s competitive advantages and weaknesses
• How you can build or reinforce barriers to competitors
• Existing bench strength to ensure your company has the right talent to achieved desired results

The list above is far from exhaustive, but can serve as a guide for future initiatives.

Is your business creating maximum value?

Complete the “Value Builder” questionnaire today in just 13 minutes and we’ll send you a 27-page custom report assessing how well your business is positioned for selling. Take the test now:

By Axial | February 1, 2017

There are many reasons a business might achieve less than its desired price upon sale, the most fundamental of which is that a buyer does not assign the business the same value as the seller.

Here are some common company characteristics that cause buyers to downgrade value — and ways to address them in advance of a sale.

1. Your business is disproportionately dependent.

A business should not be overwhelmingly dependent on any one customer, employee, or supplier.

If a key employee quits unexpectedly, a supplier goes out of business, or a customer leaves for a competitor, will your revenue dip by a meaningful amount? According to a recent webinar held by John Warrillow, author of a www.builttosell.com, no more than 10-15% of revenue should be coming from one person or source.

2. You don’t have a plan for growth.

Buyers look for companies with a foreseeable path for growth. As a seller, you should be proactive in identifying where growth opportunities exist and how a new owner might take advantage of them.

You might present the potential buyer with a list of businesses you have considered as potential acquisition targets, or provide details around new geographic markets or customer segments. Be sure to demonstrate what resources are in place to support increased demand, should the new owner choose to pursue any of these strategies.

“You want to present a buyer with a map to growth, not simply say, well, here’s where we’ve gotten and now it’s up to you,” says Giff Constable, a former investment banker and current VP of Product at Axial. “These growth areas should be defendable both in terms of proof points to back your ideas up as well as the company’s ability to actually execute on them.”

Warrillow’s research shows that mid-sized businesses that have plans in place to meet a substantial, overnight increase in demand could get up to 4.5x on earnings (vs. 3.7x for the average business).

3. Your company is strapped for cash flow.

The more cash you generate in excess of your working capital requirements, the more your company will be worth.

“When a buyer buys your business, he writes two checks — one to you, as the owner, and one for working capital. If they have to inject a lot of working capital into your company, their appetite to write a big check to you is going to be less,” says Warrillow.

The two main ways to increase cash flow are to accelerate accounts receivable and to extend accounts payable. To achieve the first, incent your customers to pay early by offering discounts for paying within a certain period of time. It’s also wise to accommodate as many methods of payment as possible (credit cards, wire transfers, etc.) to offer flexibility to your customers.

While delaying payments made to suppliers or vendors can be a bit trickier, negotiating terms to extend payment deadlines, or opting for annual versus more regular payments (and spreading out those annual contracts) can help you keep more cash on hand.

For companies in industries where the cost of working capital is characteristically high, such as manufacturing and retail/consumer products, think about creative ways to bring more cash into the business, such as charging for ongoing customer service, membership programs, and rewards.

4. You don’t have recurring revenue.

We’ve all seen the headlines for tech companies fetching high multiples. Particularly for companies with subscription-based revenue models, buyers have been known to pay lofty premiums for the advantage of being able to lock in predictable future revenue.

A subscription, or recurring revenue model, has long been a widely-accepted strategy for companies which have repeat customers and products or services that are consumed over time (for example media and software).

For companies outside of this sphere (e.g., seasonal businesses or companies who have to maintain a high inventory, such as retailers or manufacturers), creating predictable, recurring revenue may not be as obvious. That doesn’t mean, however, that it can’t be achieved.

One great example of a more traditional business with a recurring revenue model is Michelin Tires. Instead of selling tires, Michelin employs a per-mile payment model, which is more effective at establishing loyal long-term customers.

5. You are in a commoditized business.

The less differentiated your business is, the less attractive it will be to a buyer. Warrillow says that companies should focus on building a “deep and wide competitive moat” — i.e., high barriers that disable other market entrants from gaining share of business from you.

One of the unavoidable side effects of being a highly commoditized business is having to compete on price. The less pricing authority you have, the less money you can make. The less money you make, the less you have to invest into growing the business.

Warrillow’s research shows that companies that focus on creating this level of authority in their market can increase their multiple by a full turn over the average small to mid-sized business.

6. The business can’t succeed without you.

If you’re exiting the business, expect a buyer to spend less time with you and much more digging into the competencies of your team. A company that expects to get top dollar must prove that operations can not only be sustained, but flourish, under the new owner. Since there’s likely a learning curve before a new chief operator can reach the same level of effectiveness as the exited owner, the support of the existing team is paramount to a successful transition.

Here are few questions to expect from buyers:

• What proportion of your customers did you personally have to sell in order to convert them into customers?Is their satisfaction and relationship with your company dependent on that personal relationship? If the answer is “a majority” and “yes”, then it’s time to separate yourself from your customer base and move those relationships onto other members of your team.
• How often do employees come to you with issues within the business? Are they coming for your ideas or for your approval on their own ideas they’ve devised to solve the problem? The former could signal that you don’t have the right people in place to make confident decisions about the business.
• How often do you take vacation and for how long?Does performance take a dip in your absence? If you find you either can never take vacation, or have to work throughout your time off to keep things afloat, you may need to identify what pieces of the business are faltering and why and put corrections in place.

This article provided courtesy of Axial  –  www.axial.net

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Stephanie Breedlove started Breedlove & Associates in 1992 as a way to pay her nanny. The big payroll processors weren’t interested in dealing with one person’s wages and doing it themselves was complicated and time-consuming, too much for the then overwhelmed Breedloves.

Breedlove saw a business opportunity and started a payroll company for parents who needed to pay their nannies. By 2012, Breedlove & Associates had grown to $9MM in revenue and then she received a $54MM acquisition offer.

To give you some context of how incredible it is to sell a $9MM business for $54MM let’s look at the numbers. At The Value Builder System™, more than 25,000 business owners have completed the Value Builder Score questionnaire, part of which asks about any acquisition offers they may have received. The average multiple offered is 3.76 times pre-tax profit. Even the best-performing businesses, those with a Value Builder Score of 80+, only get offers of 6.27 times pre-tax profit on average. Breedlove got close to six times revenue.

What did Breedlove do right? We’re going to look at the five things Breedlove did—and that you can do—to drive up the value of a business.

Sell Less Stuff to More People

When Breedlove hit $30K per month in revenue, she quit her job at Accenture (formerly Anderson Consulting) and devoted herself to Breedlove & Associates full-time. To grow, she had a choice: sell more to her existing customers (e.g. busy couples often need lawn-care, house-cleaning, or grocery-delivery services) or stick with her niche of paying nannies. Most consultants and experts would say it’s easier to sell more to existing customers (and they’re right), but it doesn’t make your business more valuable. Breedlove decided to stick to her niche and find more parents who needed to pay their nannies, and that decision laid the foundation for a more valuable business.

Investors from Warren Buffet look for companies with a deep and wide competitive moat that gives the owner pricing authority. When you have a differentiated product or service, we call it having The Monopoly Control and companies with a monopoly get significantly higher acquisition offers.

Rather than selling existing customers generic services in commoditized markets, Breedlove focused on selling one thing to as many customers as she could find.

Strive for 50%+ Net Promoter Score

One feature that interested acquirers look for is your customer satisfaction levels. Increasingly, they are turning to the Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a measure of this. NPS was developed by Fred Reichheld and his team at Satmetrix, who discovered that your customers’ willingness to refer you to their friends or colleagues is highly predictive of your company’s future growth rate.

The NPS approach is to ask your customers how willing they would be to refer your company to a friend or colleague, on a scale of 0 to 10. They are then categorized into Promoters (9s and 10s), Passives (7s and 8s) or Detractors (0–6s). The NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Promoters from the percentage of Detractors. Most businesses achieve an NPS of 10% to 15%, while the very best companies (think Apple and Amazon) get scores of 50% or more.

Breedlove obsessed over her company’s NPS and realized the key to driving it up was perfecting the first few interactions with a new customer. When you call a big payroll company looking for a service to pay your nanny, the response can be underwhelming. With only one person to pay, you are often relegated to the most junior staff member and even they would rather be dealing with a larger client.

When you call Breedlove, by contrast, you get a team of professionals totally focused on setting you up. You’re not an afterthought. You’re not passed on. Instead, you get the best onboarding talent the company has to offer.

This set-up team was a big part of how Breedlove achieved an astonishing 78% NPS.

Create Recurring Revenue Streams

The third thing that made Breedlove’s company attractive was recurring revenue.

Regardless of what industry you’re in, recurring revenue models give acquirers more confidence that the business will keep going strong after you leave.

By 2012, Breedlove & Associates had grown to $9MM and, given the nature of the payroll business, 100% of their revenue was recurring.

Reduce Reliance on Customers, Employees and Suppliers

Breedlove’s company was also attractive to buyers because she had a highly diversified customer base with no single customer representing even close to 1% of her revenue. If more than 10% to 15% of your revenue comes from one buyer, you can expect prospective acquirers to ask a lot more questions.

Customer concentration is one of three factors that make up The Switzerland Structure Module. The Switzerland Structure measures your business’ dependence on a single customer, employee or supplier.

Find an Acquirer You Can Help Grow

By 2012, Breedlove & Associates was growing 17% per year, which is good but not blow-your-mind good. So how did she attract such an incredible acquisition offer? The trick was showing her acquirer how they could grow.

In Breedlove’s case, she sold her company to Care.com. Think of Care.com as the Angie’s List of care providers (e.g. child care, senior care, etc.). If you need someone to care for your kids or an elderly relative, you enter your address into their website and Care.com will give you a list of vetted caregivers in your area.

At the time of the acquisition, Breedlove had 10,000 customers and Care.com had seven million members. Breedlove argued that if just 1% of Care.com’s members used Breedlove’s payroll service, it would equate to 7X growth in Breedlove & Associates almost overnight.

In 2012, Care.com acquired Breedlove & Associates for $54MM—an outstanding exit made possible by Breedlove’s focus on what drove her company’s value, not just their top-line revenue.

Would you like to find out how well positioned your business is to be sold?

Complete the “Value Builder” questionnaire today in just 13 minutes and we’ll send you a 27-page custom report complete with your score on the eight key drivers of Value Builder. Take the test now:

For business owners, the New Year is an ideal time to reflect on long-term goals for your organization. A banker can provide valuable insight on trends in your industry and the market as a whole.

We talked to George Shea, Managing Partner at Focus Investment Bank, and Keith Dee, Founder and President of Osage Advisors, about a few of their insights for M&A going into 2017.

For those looking to explore a transaction in 2017, “my biggest advice is to begin thinking long before you execute, whether you do it on your own or hire an investment banker,” says Shea. “Make sure you have your financial house in order and understand the key metrics of your business — you should be able to slice and dice your financial information quickly and efficiently.”

3 M&A Insights

1. “Search funds have proliferated the lower middle market.”

Search funds typically comprise individuals who are looking to buy and then operate a company (usually one smaller in size than the typical target for a private equity firm). “There were a handful of search funds five years ago, and now they’re everywhere,” says Dee. “When a business does not fit the overall objectives of either a strategic buyer or private equity fund, search funds provide a viable option for owners looking to sell their businesses.

Promoted as part of top MBA programs, “they’ve become a generational trend for young entrepreneurs who want to buy a business and who have an investor base backing them up.” He notes that search funds tend to be conservative when it comes to valuations — he estimates 90% will be below strategics or even private equity — “because they will become the owner-operator of the business and have to go back and sell the deal to their investors who write the checks for them.”

2. “Private equity is going upstream.”  

“I’ve found equity investors are less interested in small add-ons unless they meet very stringent investment criteria,” says Dee, who typically works with companies between $1-$5 million in EBITDA.

“This is especially true for sub-$2 million deals, an area they were much more aggressive in a couple of years ago. With the money they’re raising now — half billion dollar funds vs. quarter billion dollar funds — it might not make sense as they are looking to deploy more capital per transaction.”

This may mean smaller companies looking to sell turn to strategic buyers, search funds, or independent sponsors (also on the rise).

3. “It’s still a seller’s market.”

We’re not at the peak of the seller’s market yet, according to Dee. “There’s so much money in the lower middle market, and even more being raised on the equity side. Equity investors and strategics alike are all looking for quality deal flow. It all comes back to supply and demand. It continues to be a seller’s market due to a short supply of quality companies, and I’m not sure when the pendulum will switch to a buyer’s market.”

“Timing is everything,” he adds. “You always want to be selling on an uptrend. You don’t have to be selling at the top of the market, but you do want to be selling on positive trends both in terms of sales and EBITDA.”

This article provided courtesy of Axial  –  and written By Meghan Daniels,| December 15, 2016

www.axial.net

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Will this be the year you seriously drive up the value of your company?

If you have resolved to make your company more valuable in 2017, you may want to think hard about how your customers pay.

If you have a transaction business model where customers pay once for what they buy, expect your company’s value to be a single-digit multiple of your Earnings Before Interest Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization (EBITDA).

If you have a recurring revenue model, by contrast, where customers subscribe and pay on an ongoing basis, you can expect your valuation to be a multiple of your revenue.

Breedlove & Associates Sells for 6X Revenue

In 1992 Stephanie Breedlove started a payroll company to make it easier for parents to pay their nannies on a recurring basis. It began small and Breedlove self-funded her growth, which averaged 20% per year.

By 2012, Breedlove & Associates had hit $9 million in annual sales when Breedlove accepted an offer from Care.com of $55 million for her business—representing an astronomical multiple of more than six times Breedlove’s revenue.

Buyers pay up for companies with recurring revenue because they can clearly see how your company will make money long after you hit the exit.

Not sure how to create recurring revenue? Here are four models to consider:

Products That Run Out

If you have a product that people run out of, consider offering it on subscription. The retailing giant Target sells subscriptions to diapers for busy parents who don’t have the time (or interest) in running to the store to re-stock on Pampers. Dollar Shave Club, which was recently acquired by Unilever for five times revenue, sells razor blades on subscription. The Honest Company sells dish detergent and safe household cleaning products to environmentally conscious consumers and more than 80% of their sales come from subscriptions.

Membership Websites

If you’re a consultant and offer specialized advice, consider whether customers might pay access to a premium membership website where you offer your know-how to subscribers only. Today there are membership websites for people who want to know about anything from Search Engine Marketing to running a restaurant.

Services Contracts

If you bill by the hour or the project, consider moving to a fixed monthly fee for your service. That’s what the marketing agency GoBrandGo! has done to steady cash flow and create a more predictable service business.

Piggyback Services

Ask yourself what your “one-off” customers buy after they buy what you sell. For example, if you make a company a new website, chances are they are going to need somewhere to host their site. While your initial website design may be a one-off service, you could offer to host it for your customer on subscription. If you offer interior design, chances are your customers are going to want to keep their home looking like the day you presented your design, so they might be in the market for a regular cleaning service.

Rentals

If you offer something expensive that customers only need occasionally, consider renting access to it for those who subscribe. ZipCar subscribers can have access to a car when they need it without forking over the cash to buy a hunk of steel. WeWork subscribers can have access to the company’s co-working space without buying a building or committing to a long-term lease.

You don’t have to be a software company to create customers who pay you automatically each month. There is simply no faster way to improve the value of your business this year than to add some recurring revenue.

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Imagine you’re a farmer and you’ve been tending to your crops all year. It’s harvest season and finally time to collect the spoils of your labor.

You start harvesting your crops only to find out that pesky rodents have been quietly eating away at your fields. You’re devastated as you come to the realization that much of what you have been working so hard to cultivate has already been taken.

Feeling like there is not much field left to harvest is what acquirers and investors are trying to avoid as they evaluate buying your business. Metaphorically speaking, acquirers want to know that if they buy your business, there will be plenty of fresh farmland left for them to till.

Addressable Market

Investors call it your company’s “addressable market” and it is one of the main factors buyers will look at when they evaluate the potential of acquiring your company.

Business 101 tells us we should strive for market share so we can control pricing. Market share is a worthy goal if your objective is to maximize your profits. However, if your primary objective is to increase the value of your company, you want to be able to communicate that you have relatively low market share across the entire addressable market. In other words, there is plenty of field left to plough.

Consider the following ways you might expand the way you are currently thinking about the addressable market for what you sell:

Demographics

Demographics involve segmenting a market by objective measures like gender, income, age and education level. Marriott is a hotel chain but they have created a variety of brands to address the various demographic segments they want to serve. Ritz Carlton is a Marriott brand that appeals to well-heeled travellers, but if all you want is a basic room, you could opt for a Courtyard Marriott. It’s the same company, but they have expanded their addressable market by focusing on different demographic segments.

Psychographics

Psychographics involve segmenting your market according to the way people think. Toyota produces the Prius, which gets 50 miles per gallon and is a favourite among environmentalists. Toyota also produces the thirsty Tundra pickup truck and, at just 15 miles per gallon, attracts a different psychographic segment.

Geography

Success in your local market is good but if you want to really boost the value of your company in the eyes of an acquirer, you need to demonstrate that your concept crosses geographic lines. McDonald’s has more than fourteen thousand locations in the United States but they have also demonstrated that the golden arches can draw a crowd in other markets. McDonald’s has nearly three thousand stores in Japan, two thousand in China and more than a thousand locations in each of the European countries of Germany, Canada, France and the United Kingdom.

You don’t actually have to become a global giant like Marriott, Toyota or McDonald’s to increase your company’s value but you do need to be able to communicate that your concept could work in other markets and that there is still good land left to plough.

Would you like to find out how well positioned your business is to be sold?

Complete the “Value Builder” questionnaire today in just 13 minutes and we’ll send you a 27-page custom report complete with your score on the eight key drivers of Value Builder. Take the test now: