A sell-able, scale-able business requires a lot of hard graft for 5-15 years but once you’ve created a huge asset it can be sold for millions and you can look at retiring early! 

Your company name is known all over your city (and beyond). Your friends often spot your fleet of vans on the road. You have a large team on the tools that offer a 5 star service. You also have a large office set up with a team that answers new enquiries, a finance team, and even a HR department. The business is making a healthy profit year on year. You are creating procedures in every department to gear up for selling what you have built.

Judging from how you answered the quiz questions, it sounds like you want to create a business that can be sold for a healthy profit whilst still giving you a healthy income in the meantime.

Sounds like you? Keep on reading for advice on making your dream business a reality…

In order to run an sell-able, scale-able business and still see growth you need: 

• Consistent stream of new, quality customers. You need to know, regardless of the time of year, that your phone is going to ring with quality customers who are prepared to pay your prices and value your work. It is therefore important for your marketing to be flexible for your business, so if your work is seasonal or has quieter months, then you  can ‘dial up’ your marketing to ensure a healthy stream of new work. Alternatively, if your diary is full, you ‘dial down’ and spend less which will decrease overheads. Whilst not all marketing methods allow this flexibility, Google Ads is a marketing avenue which you can control based on how busy your diary is, therefore providing a consistent stream of new customers that works for you.

Why not have a FREE 30 minute consultation with one of our experts today to find out how many leads per month you could get?

• Local presence. An easy way to create a ‘future-proof’ business is to have a fantastic reputation in your local neighbourhood. You want people to recommend your business and to choose you, for years to come, instead of your competitors. Build up 100’s of 5 star Google and Facebook reviews. Get locals to recommend you on Facebook forums. Create a reason for current customers to want to refer you to others. 
• Delegate jobs that you don’t like doing. Write a list of the jobs that you do each month that you do not enjoy or take up a lot of time such as, chasing invoices, answering the phones, asking customers to leave a Google review, managing your own online advertising etc. Then, look at how you can delegate these jobs to either another person, or use a software to automate the task. If you want your owner-operator business to grow you cannot afford to be working 40+ hours per week on jobs you don’t enjoy (or perhaps aren’t skilled in), and have time left each week to focus on business growth.

Here’s some excellent advice from people who have grown a sell-able, scale-able business style business and got rich doing so! 

• Book: Surge: Time the Marketplace, Ride the Wave of Consumer Demand, and Become Your Industry’s Big Kahuna by Mike Michalowicz
• Book: Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE by Phil Knight
• Podcast: How to Harness Staffing Power to Deliver Top-Quality Service and Win Life-long Customers by The Home Service Expert Podcast. (1 hr 19 mins) This podcast interviews Al Levi, a successful plumber who talks about why you NEED a create systems in order to run and eventually sell your business. Al Levi has been rated as one of the 25 most influential contractors in the United States by Plumbing and Mechanical Magazine. After starting and growing his own business, he was able to sell the business to then retire before reaching 50. He is the author of The 7-Power Contractor, and helped in co-authoring the book The Home Service Millionaire. 

Want to chat about growing your owner-operated business and getting more leads? Book in a 30 min call with our expert business developers – they’ll show you how we can help your business grow.