The Neo CEO

If you ever want to sell your business, you need a plan. Depending on the size of your business, proper strategic exit planning can take anywhere from 1 to 7 years to do right.

And, when you've maximized the value of your business and are ready to sell it, according to the US Small Business Administration, it can take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years to sell.

In this podcast, we tap the expertise of an exit planning expert: our friend, entrepreneur and author John Warrillow. Having built and sold four successful companies, John knows the secrets to creating a sellable business. John shares his own experiences and lessons learned, and talks about his new book, Built to Sell.

Podcast: Is Your Business Built to Sell?

(Download MP3)

For a limited time, get a $5.00 discount on John Warrillow's book, Built to Sell and a complimentary copy of "The Model for Selling Your Business" eBook.

In Built to Sell John shares with you:

• The 8 steps to creating a sellable company
• How to attract multiple strategic bidders for your business
• How to maximize your valuation and get the highest possible price for your business
• The secret to getting your cash upfront and avoiding a lengthy earn out

John Warrillow is an entrepreneur, author and speaker. Throughout his career as an entrepreneur, John has started and exited four companies. Most recently he transformed Warrillow & Co. from a boutique consultancy into a recurring revenue model subscription business, which he sold to The Corporate Executive Board (NASDAQ: EXBD) in 2008. He is the author of Built to Sell and Drilling for Gold and in 2008 was recognized by BtoB magazine’s “Who’s Who” list. builttosell.com

Using Your Family’s Money

When you use your personal credit card to buy business items, you instantly slash the amount of credit you have available to get the things you and your family need and want. If you’re like most people, you regard your credit cards as the financial cushion that will carry you through emergencies—such as an illness that makes it impossible to work, or catastrophic house repairs. It’s important to realize that wasting your credit on business expenses weakens your ability to use your personal credit as a safety net.

Still, many entrepreneurs ignore the dramatic consequences of this dangerous practice:

• They buy business-related items with their personal credit cards.
• They “borrow” the money they’ve socked away for retirement, education, and savings accounts … and “invest” it into the business.
• They obtain other personal credit cards, leases, loans and lines of credit.

And, once their borrowing limits are maxed out … they persuade their spouses or other family members into using their credit to continue financing the business. 

Be forewarned: if you convince your family members to finance your business, you’re just digging a deeper hole for your family to crawl out of. If your business fails your family could be wiped out financially.

Don’t ask family members to use their personal credit to invest in your business. Using your personal credit to pay for business expenses is a strategic error. And if it doesn’t make sense for you, the business owner, it makes even less sense for family members. Our advice: keep everyone’s personal credit strictly separated from your company’s corporate credit.

The System for Building Business Credit

If you need help incorporating or building good business credit, click here for a complimentary business credit consultation and to obtain our free e-Book, "Unlimited Business Financing—Without a Personal Guarantee”—a step-by-step process for building a business credit asset.

Almost every business owner wants more leads for their business. In fact, for many owners the need for a constant inflow of qualified leads often dominates their thinking. There are, however, many challenges to ensuring and maintaining that supply. And, in addition to the needs of today, growth objectives and profit goals will require increased revenue which must come from increased sales—which means more leads. So are there really “sure-fire” methods of lead generation? And, if so, what are they?

Start With Your Plan

Truly successful lead generation must always be an integrated part of your marketing strategy. And this rests on having a comprehensive plan that takes into account the demographics and psychographics of your target market, as well as your positioning—the perception of your business and your product/services held by that target market. In other words, your lead generation efforts must be guided by who it is you are ideally trying to attract to your business and what it is you’re promising them.

A mistake many business owners make with lead generation activities is to simply try different things with no real thought about who their ideal customers are, where they are, and how to best reach them. Random acts of lead generation produce random results—and a very questionable ROI.

Assuming you have effectively put together a strategic marketing plan and you know your ideal target market customer, what can you do right now to generate some solid, qualified leads?

5 Ways to Get Them to Bite

Here are some tried-and-true methods for getting good leads quickly:

• Team up: Many businesses can find ways to share resources with other non-competing businesses that targets similar customers. One of our clients who specialize in dent removal teamed up with an auto detailing facility to exchange customer lists and trade discount coupons to promote each other’s services. Clients who had a dent removed from their car received a coupon for detailing and the detailer did the same for our client. Not only did each of them enlarge their potential customer database by sharing information, they also opened the doors for co-branding opportunities, to boot!
• Referrals: Time, experience and much research has concluded that nothing brings a qualified lead to your door better than the recommendation of a friend or colleague. Having a structured and intentional system, or program, in place to elicit referrals is not only a sure-fire way to generate qualified leads, but it is highly cost-effective as well. 
• Word-of-Mouth: According to Wikipedia, word-of-mouth marketing “encompasses a variety of subcategories, including buzz, blog, viral, grassroots, cause influencers and social media marketing.” People tend to act on what they hear in this way because of the added layer of integrity perceived in it. In other words, getting people to talk about your company, your products or services, who you are and what you do, is an effective means of moving people to come to your business. We often say that your best salespeople are satisfied customers.
• Give it away: Give your product or service for free on a limited or one-time basis. This is especially effective if you’re a restaurant, a spa, or any service-oriented business. Make it a random weekday for just one hour, for example. The restaurant chain Macaroni Grill did this when they first opened with the idea of building mid-week traffic and it was incredibly effective. The old saying that “samples sell” holds a great deal of truth. And lead potential!
• Surprise them: Never underestimate the power of surprise, of the unexpected. Reach out and “touch base” with your pool of past or current customers, but do something spontaneous or out of the ordinary when contacting them. If you can find ways to surprise and delight current or past customers you can then leverage the power of that moment to generate a new sale. Although you may not always think of them as potential leads, these folks are almost always a great source of qualified leads and can be a far more cost-effective source. The added bonus is that your lead conversion, or sales process is often shorter and easier with repeat business.

Where There’s a Way There’s a Lead

The real key to generating more leads is how well you know your most probable customers—your target market. This is why making lead generation a systemic part of your marketing is so important. However, even though continual research and quantification of data on your target market is essential, it’s also critical to avoid getting stalled by too much analysis and not enough action! It was the American General and military strategist George S. Patton, who said: “A good plan, violently executed today, is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” A good strategy supported by some effective tactics will result in the leads you need.

Share Your Story

What lead generation activities do you rely on? What's worked for you in the past? Post a comment and tell us about it.

Further Reading

Advertising is Not Marketing
Tips to Drum Up Sales Now
Stop, Ask and Listen: Exploring the Links between Marketing and Client Fulfillment