How to Exit Your Business Rich – Michelle Seiler Tucker 

If you want to exit your business rich one day, you have to start planning it ahead. As a matter of fact, you should plan your business exit from day one.

Our guest today is an expert on selling businesses.

Michelle is the Founder and President of Seiler Tucker, a company specializing in selling businesses. With over 20 years of experience in the M&A industry, she is regarded as the leading authority on buying, selling, fixing, and growing businesses. She has sold over 500 businesses to date and currently owns and operates several successful companies herself. On top of that, she’s a published book author, an international keynote speaker, and a podcast host.

Michelle is passionate about helping entrepreneurs exit rich and maximize the worth of their company. But to do that, you have to start planning your exit from day one.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we talk about why it’s never too early to start thinking about exiting your business, the six Ps of building a scalable and sellable business, the importance of innovation and marketing for your company’s success and why you need to have a mentor.

If you want to learn how to launch a scalable and sellable business, tune into this episode to find out.

Guest-At-A-Glance

 

💡 Name: Michelle Seiler Tucker

💡 What she does: Michelle is the Founder and President of Seiler Tucker, a company specializing in selling business.

💡 Noteworthy: She’s the author of WSJ & USA TODAY Bestseller EXIT RICH—the method to sell your business for a huge profit.

💡 Key Quote: “I got to make sure I can grow the owners because if you don’t grow the owners, you’ll never grow the business.”

💡 Where to find her: LinkedIn

 

Key Insights

 

You have to plan an exit strategy for your business from day one. One of the biggest mistakes that many business owners make is they don’t plan their business exit in time. Even if you don’t intend to sell your business just yet, it’s important you have an exit strategy from the beginning because you never know what the next day may bring. So, make sure you plan to sell from day one.

Michelle explains, “I know it’s difficult to wrap your head around selling your business when you begin, but you got to build that sellable asset. It’s kind of like when you go into business you say, ‘Here’s my widget. Here’s my target market. I’m gonna build my widget to my specific target market. I’m not going to be everything to everybody. But I’m going to figure out what is the criteria for this target market. I’m gonna make sure that I build this widget to meet the specific criteria’. Your business is your widget. You need to grow your business to sell to the types of buyers that are going to be willing to pay you top dollar when you’re ready.”

How to launch, scale, and sell a successful business? In her book, Michelle talks about the crucial six Ps of building a sustainable, scalable, and sellable business: People, Product, Processes, Proprietary, Patriots, and Profits. This method is all about helping entrepreneurs build a sustainable business that can run without them. Having this infrastructure will allow them to work more on the business, and not in the business.

“Don’t we go into business for ourselves to have more quality of time, to have the freedom to do the things that we love so we’re not missing out on life? Well, business owners are getting stuck working in their business. So you really have to build a team. One of the biggest issues with entrepreneurs is they think that they can do it all.”

Never stop innovating. Innovation is the biggest driver of growth. No matter your industry or field of expertise, you have to always keep innovating and marketing your brand. Innovation and marketing are keys to success. If you don’t innovate, you will lose market share to your competitors and eventually fail.

“The reason that 70% of businesses are going out of business after 10 years for one reason and one reason only, and is called lack of aim. Aim is always innovate and market. They stop innovating like at Blockbuster. They did nothing new. They had the opportunity but Netflix, they sat back and did nothing. Look at Toys R Us, they didn’t do anything new in 75 years. So businesses have life cycles just like humans do. It goes from the incubator to death. And you gotta see what cycle you’re in. And so you really always have to innovate and always market. If you don’t, you’re going to lose market share.”

You need a business mentor who will provide you with a fresh perspective. Every entrepreneur should find a mentor to guide them in their journey. If you want to get ahead in life and achieve your goal faster, find someone who can shorten your path to success. As Michelle puts it, you don’t always have to learn from your mistakes, you can learn from your mentor’s experience too.

“I always tell everyone, it’s hard to read the label from the inside of the bottle. We’re in the inside of a bottle in our business. It’s hard to read the label from the inside of the bottle. We need an outsider’s perspective to read the warning signs and keep us out of the danger zone. And I always tell business owners and entrepreneurs, find yourself a mentor. You really need a mentor. You need a mentor in many areas of your life.”

Top Quotes

 

“First and foremost, business owners don’t think about selling their business. They’re so busy working in it instead of on it and most business owners have really created a glorified job that they go to work every day versus a business that actually works for them. And so business owners don’t think about selling their business until a catastrophic event occurs that can be internal or external.”

“You always have to be ready. And I’m trying to change that landscape for business owners because most business owners are not ready.”

“Entrepreneurs, especially younger entrepreneurs that are starting businesses are not starting brick and mortar. They’re looking around the world and they’re looking at the problems that exist and they’re looking at how to solve those problems. So they’re more solution-oriented, they do their due diligence, and because they’re not brick and mortar, it doesn’t take as much working capital in most cases.”

“The more well-branded you are, the more I can sell your business for as long as your brand is relevant in the mind of the consumer. Is anybody paying any money for Blockbuster? No, but the biggest brand in the world is, do you know? I like to tell the story because it gets people’s minds really going. The more well-branded you are, the more money you will make in the sale of your company.”

“It’s really important to build your brand, not just your personal brand, you have to build your company brand too.”

“You’ll never be able to grow without letting go of the control. When I finally get them to agree to let go of control, then they trust but they don’t verify. And I don’t inspect what they expect. So there are two out of five businesses, three out of five businesses that get embezzled every single year.”

Links

Exit Rich Book + additional value

The Exit Rich Podcast

Take the “ST 6 P quiz”

Exit Rich Facebook