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Mark: Hi it’s Mark from Top Local Lead Generation, we’re here with John Nieuwenburg, he’s the super business coach in Vancouver. So we’re going to talk about the hidden goal of the smartest business owners, which is something I have no idea about because I’m not the smartest business owner but maybe you can help catch me up a little bit, I’d appreciate that.
John: Well the hidden goal for the smartest business owner is to prepare their business for sale. There’s a story of a colleague of mine who owned a very expensive house in a very lovely neighbourhood in Chicago called Lake Forrest, it was a ten minute walk to the lake, to Lake Michigan, ten minute walk to the city centre of their little village and they wanted to sell the home. They found the experience very frustrating because over the course of a year they had lots of people visit the home but every one of them considered it dated and not really suitable and so they did the unthinkable, they took the house off the market, they renovated the home, put it back up for sale and then got a fairly quick offer so here’s the point, they lived in this home for something like twenty years, in all that time they enjoyed living in that home, then they went and renovated the home only to immediately sell it and not enjoy the benefits of having it renovated. So how does this relate to the hidden goal of the business owner? The purpose of a business, one of the primary purposes of a business is to give you the lifestyle that you want and one dimension of that lifestyle is so that you have time and money freedom meaning that you’re free to use your time in the way that you wish and that you have money available to do the things that you care to do.
So in order to do that, the best way to do that is to prepare your business as if you wanted to put it up for sale because the things that it takes to optimize your business for sale are the very things that will give you time and money freedom. Yeah, isn’t that amazing. So like my little story of the house, why would you put off renovating your house, why would you put off optimizing your business until you’re ready for sale if you can enjoy the benefits of having that optimized business for the entire time that you own it? And so, what does that mean? It means that you know, if everyone of your customers it knows your name by on their speed dial then that’s likely not going to be a business optimized as you need to be there in order to serve those customers so if you want to get away from that then your brand, your company has to be more important to your customers than you the individual owner. If you couldn’t take a month’s vacation without coming back to a disaster then your business isn’t optimized from the point of view of a buyer because again it demonstrates that you need to be in the business for the business to flourish and why would someone want to buy that business?
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