A longstanding credo for successful business planning is make specific goals. However, there is such a thing as being overly specific in your goals to the detriment of other things that matter to you. Let’s look at how adding fuzziness to specific goals can make your business planning strategies more fulfilling.

Analytics vs. Eye Test

In the world of sports, there’s often great debate between the value of analytics versus the eye test. Analytics often provide hard, quantitative evidence of performance, while the eye test relies on intuitive, qualitative evidence about performance.

Owning a successful business is a constant exercise in planning. Many successful business owners have already committed to personal financial planning, including investing and providing financial security for themselves and their families. 

However, fewer business owners have created a business continuity plan. A business continuity plan includes strategies and action items regarding what happens to the business if or when you are no longer available to run it (due to choice, death, or otherwise). 

Lacking a business continuity plan can harm your personal financial planning. On the other hand, creating a business continuity plan can often complement your personal financial planning. Let’s look at a couple of ways your business continuity planning might connect to your personal financial planning.

If cash is king, then cash flow is the kingmaker.

Cash flow can have a multiplier effect in terms of achieving your planning goals for a successful future. Often, increasing cash flow requires strong performances from key employees. Let’s look at how properly motivating your key employees could cause a cascading effect that creates a virtuous circle of increasing cash flow.

Mary, Mary, not so contrary

For years, Mary Kowolski’s custom garden-growing-formula business had been on an upward trajectory. But recently, she noticed that cash flow had plateaued, right as she began thinking about planning for her retirement. She wasn’t sure why.

The one thing that makes humans unique (and the most dominant species on the planet) is our ability to communicate using language. Why, then, do so many business owners fail to communicate their business plans—both short term and long term—to those who can best help them achieve them?

A business plan isn’t something to tuck away. Instead, it’s something to share so that you can best achieve the goals your business plan sets. Let’s look at three ways communicating your business plan can benefit you, your company, and your future.

Communication is the First Step

No matter how you define business success, one thing is constant: When everyone is rowing in the same direction, it’s much easier to reach the destination. As you grow your business, you’ll likely find that the stronger your internal people and processes are, the more options you have to achieve success. 

Today, we’ll examine some of the potentially positive consequences of preparing your key employees for a stake in ownership. Whether your long-term plans are to sell your business (to employees or a third party) or stay forever, prepping your key people for possible ownership can position you for greater success.

One of the most important elements of a successful business transition is transferable value. No matter what an owner sees for the future of the business, transferable value can be the common denominator that makes all goals more achievable.

What is Transferable Value

Transferable value, for a closely-held business, is most simply what a business is worth to someone else without its original owner. Transferable value should not be confused with profit. Just because your company brings in millions of dollars of profit each year, does not necessarily mean it has transferable value. True transferable value in a business is determined not by how well you run the business, but by how well the business runs without you.

Business owners aren’t always aware that transferable value is more than a formula involving multiples of earnings or some calculation of discounted future cash flows. To get a more accurate representation of the current state of your company’s transferable value, you can start by asking yourself a few questions:

Planning for a successful future without your business is a smart strategy. One of the traps that business owners commonly fall into as they begin planning for their successful future without the business is seeing what they need to do and trying to do everything all at once. However, much like your business didn’t spring into success overnight all those years ago, future-oriented planning doesn’t need to be a one-and-done proposition.

Let’s look at how a phased approach to planning can help you get the most out of your efforts and make the process more manageable. 

You Can’t Catch the Fish Without Throwing in a Line

Bill Burns was ready to go fishing. Over 40 years, he grew what was originally a one-man logistics

As a business owner, you manage all sorts of complexity in your work. Goals, expectations, and the people who help you meet them may change. But even though things constantly change, you can still adapt, thanks to smart and focused business planning. After all, if your company couldn’t adapt to change, it likely wouldn’t be as successful as it is today.

The same ideas apply when you’re planning for your business’ future and the evolution of your relationship to it. Change is often more than just OK—it may be necessary to position yourself to reach your future ownership goals and give your business the best chance to thrive long term.

Successful business owners constantly strive for growth. And when everything’s humming along, it can be easy to think the good times will last forever. However, it’s crucial to protect yourself, your company, and your future against employee risk throughout your growth and planning.

While it’s likely that many of your employees are good people working in good faith, just one error or bad-faith employee can ruin years of planning. Today, we’ll walk through a few ways to mitigate employee risk and the consequences of succeeding and failing in doing so.

Protecting Against Bad-Faith Employees

Key employees are those who consistently exceed expectations and tangibly affect company performance. You likely know how important it is to keep key employees on your team for the sake of your long-term success. But it’s just as important to prevent key employees from wielding their power against you.

Retaining Key Employees: One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Retaining your company’s key employees is one of the most important steps toward your business’ success. Key employees can reduce your workload, noticeably improve company performance and operations, and act as the backbone of a successful business sale in the future. So, how can you keep these employees on board and engaged as you work toward a successful future? Let’s look at some ways to keep key employees motivated to grow your business and stick with you f

Most business owners are considering several options for the future of the ownership of their businesses. If you’re keeping your options open, that is typical. But business owners who end up selling their businesses to an outside, unrelated buyer often report that they wish they had known more about what the sale process would be like, and that they wish they had spent more time (years) preparing. So, whether you are actively looking for a buyer right now, or if a sale is only one possibility you’re considering for the future, it’s important to take steps today that could be helpful in a future sale. If you put the company on the market, there will be a lot to think about, and anything you can do today to make that process easier is well worth the effort.

Benefits of Planning Ahead

Successful business owners often want more than just the maximum amount of money they can get. These owners have deeply ingrained values-based goals that guide why and how they do business. But many of those same owners don’t apply an appropriate amount of weight to values-based goals until it’s too late to achieve them.

Some owners neglect their values-based goals because they don’t come up on a balance sheet or income statement. Others don’t realize how important their values are until those values are threatened.

You can’t get anywhere if you don’t know where you’re going. It’s also obvious that once you know where you’re going, you need to lay out a path that will take you there. But things that are obvious are not always easy. It can be helpful to adopt a process that is customized to your needs but is based on an approach that has worked for others in the past.

Nadir Chandra’s story was typical of most business owners who have made the tough decision to leave their companies. At age 54, he was confident in finding a meaningful second act and was ready to leave his 25-employee commercial sign-making business. Nadir was thinking of selling to one or two of his key employees and when we met him his first question was: “Is this the right choice for me and my business?”

A successful business Exit Plan achieves three important owner goals:

1.     Financial Security: The business sale or transfer provides the amount of income the owner and owner’s family need after the owner’s exit.

2.     The Right Person: The owner chooses his or her successor (children, key employees, co-owners, or a third party).

3.     Income Tax Minimization: The owner minimizes the amount of cash the government takes out of his or her pocket.

A successful estate plan achieves three important personal goals:

As an owner of a successful business, it’s likely that you got where you are today through efficient planning. You may have planned out your business model, your competitive advantage, or your target customers and how you’d get them to use your products or services. However, you didn’t get where you are today overnight. It most likely took many hours of hard work and dedication to start and to run your business successfully. It is also likely that you were able to focus on one project at a time, and eventually strengthen the weakest links in your business operations. The dedication that you put into the start and continued success of your business should equal the dedication you bring to the future (and even the final) phases of your business. 

You’re probably pretty good at planning by now, or at least understand the process better than some other business owners do. But success can bring complexity, including more managerial, implementation, execution, and relationship development. Success doesn’t always create a lot of space for planning. Our brains may try to tell us that we’ll plan as soon as the more critical matters get taken care of. 

Planning a business exit can seem like a lot of work at first. From building business value to developing capable successors to figuring out exactly what you want to do with your life after you leave, Exit Planning might look like too much work for one person to do. In our experience, Exit Planning isn’t something that business owners can tackle alone if they want to exit on their terms. But with so much to do, where can you start?

One way to begin the Exit Planning Process is by writing your Exit Plan down. Writing your Exit Plan down can provide three potential benefits when done properly.

Increasing Clarity, Accountability, and Chances for Success

Written communication is often clearer and more specific than verbal communication. Typically, the act of writing causes business owners to think carefully, which decreases chances for misinterpretation. Minimizing misinterpretations

It is safe to say that this year was full of surprises. Some businesses thrived, while in other areas jobs were lost, companies were forced to go under, and we even lost loved ones along the way. Many businesses were affected by the pandemic in some way or another. According to a survey conducted by the PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), 43% of businesses temporarily closed, and nearly all of these closures were due to COVID-191.[1]

We also learned that many small businesses are financially or structurally fragile. Companies were often strapped for cash, even when they had access to temporary government stimulus funds. 

Setting goals is critically important to owners who begin Exit Planning. Without goals, even the strongest processes fail, because they have no purpose to work toward. Your goals are what guide your process toward a successful exit, and without them, you’ll find yourself spinning your wheels in the mud of indecision.

While setting goals is the most important thing you do as you begin your business exit journey, it doesn’t mean that you have to know exactly where you’ll end up after you exit your business. Goals can and often must