You've found your passion, built your assets, team, culture, confidence, resilience and knowledge. You've honed your appetite for risk, implemented processes and procedures for mitigating that risk, and created fall-back positions and safeguarding systems for when stuff happens that you just can't control.
Now it's time to reap the rewards of all your hard work. It's time to bring your ‘baby' to market and see what people will pay for it. Whether you sell the business completely, sell part of it (and stay on as a part owner) or seek investment from private investors, venture capitalists or equity crowdfunding, you'll need to adopt a raft of different mindsets, behaviours and procedures to make it happen. This process will require a level of commitment and focus that may take you way out of your comfort zone.
You'll be presenting and pitching to people who will want to know what you sell, who you sell it to, who your competitors are, what the growth trajectory is, what the cash position is, what the cost to run it is, what your contingency plans are if you get sick, leave or get sued — and much more.
So how do you prepare for all that? How do you position your business to get the best valuation? How do you find investors? What information do you send them, and when they show interest, what do you say? What documents and expert advisors will you need to help you put it all together?
This section is about how to add value so investors will pay you more than what you paid. A lot more.