Ep 106 Transcript: How to Build a Business That Can Run Without You

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors in spelling or inaccuracies in the spoken words.

Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business Podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon. Thank you so much for joining me today. I want to tell you something that you may not be aware of and that you may not even want to hear. And that is that most business owners, don't really build a business. You think you've built a business. What you've actually built is a really expensive job. One that doesn't even necessarily pay you the same as you would get paid if you actually went out and got a full-time job.

And if someone were to offer you money for your business tomorrow, would you even know what you're selling them or how to sell it to them or how to value it? Like, do you think that your business even has value to it? I'm going to tell you something you might not want to hear. that is that most service businesses aren't actually sellable, at least not in their current state. And that might be surprising to you, but it also might kind of resonate with you too, because think about when you started your business.

We first start our businesses. We're all excited about the launch of it. We're thinking about launching it. We're thinking about growing it. These all sound like fun things. And the last thing on our mind is exiting the business. But honestly, it should be one of the first things that we think about when we launch our businesses. And it doesn't mean that you have to have the exact plan in place. But if you built your business as one that you would want to be able to sell one day, even if you never sell it, what that's going to do is it's going to make it that much easier for you to be able to run your business today.

but most people don't operate this way. And especially because I know I'm talking to my Accidental CEOs here and we're mostly creative minds and our brains think a little bit differently than others do. And shiny object syndrome is a very real thing. So it's hard enough for us to deal with some of the backend business stuff as it is, nevermind planning for an exit. But the two really do go hand in hand. One thing that I've been doing more recently is working with home stagers.

specifically to help them to prepare their businesses for sale. And I've learned a lot as I've been navigating this with other stagers through my own experiences. And I wanted to share some of those lessons today. Now, while I've been dealing mostly with home staging businesses, I've also had numerous conversations with buyers and sellers from other industries as well. And again, I've learned a lot and I've accumulated a lot of information that I thought was going to be really valuable to put together into an episode here. One thing that

Shauna Lynn Simon (04:09.56)

A lot of people that I've encountered have identified is that you don't always know when your exit is. So imagine being prepared for it. A lot of things come up unexpectedly and you want to be able to pivot your business in a way that feels right for you, that feels good for you, that doesn't feel as though you just built this thing up just to shut it all down, close the doors and walk away. What if you could make some real money off of it? What if that money helped you to pay for your retirement or pay for that next chapter in your life, whatever that looks like?

You might find yourself exiting because you're just simply ready to retire and move on. You might find yourself exiting because another passion has really started to pull at you and you want to pursue that. Perhaps you've had some life changes, whether it's a spouse is relocating or you've got a job opportunity that you want to pursue or you want to live closer to your children or it's a parent that you want to take care of and you're moving to them or you're moving them to you or whatever it looks like.

And some of these transitions can be really exciting. Other times there's circumstances that are even more challenging to navigate because they come with some really hard choices and some really difficult times. And we're not in the right state of mind and frame of mind to be able to make informed decisions, valuable decisions, and to be able to do the work that we need to do to prepare a business for sale when we're dealing with it in kind of a quick turnaround time when something comes up urgently.

So I want you to be prepared for this. Something that I have learned through navigating all of this is that all of us need to really be thinking about our exit strategy before we even launch the business. And again, I know that doesn't sound super sexy and exciting, but it's so true. A business becomes sellable long before it's ever actually listed. And so if we can create a sellable business now, it's going to make us more money now and when it comes time to sell it.

So today I wanna talk about how to build a business that someone would actually want to buy, even if you have no intention of selling it right now. Whenever you do go to sell it, I wanna make sure that you're gonna get the most money for it. And even if you don't ever sell it, it's gonna make you so much more money now by putting these things in place. So what makes a business unsellable? What is keeping some of these businesses from selling? I'm gonna talk, walk through some of the common traps that I see.

Shauna Lynn Simon (06:26.266)

and review some of my thoughts on some of these things. This is not an all-inclusive list. It's not intended to be an all-inclusive list, but these are some of the top things that I see that are making businesses unsellable. The first one is owner dependency. Now, there's a big difference between owner dependency and just an owner-operated business. You can be an owner-operated business, which means that you are doing a lot of the work in the business, but someone else could step into your role if needed. Owner dependency means everything runs through you.

You are the sales, you are the brand, you are the operations. No one else knows how to do the things that you do. There's no documentation to this. And if you disappear, revenue disappears, plain and simple. So that's an owner dependency. And it doesn't mean that you can't sell an owner operated business. You don't have to say like, I'm barely running the business. know, everybody else runs it for me and I've stepped back from it. That doesn't have to be the case in order to make it sellable. But if it's completely dependent on you and all the things in your head, then it is not a sellable business.

which brings me to the next thing that prevents a business from selling, which is very much related to the first one. And that is you have no systems. Now I will say that in working with my clients, one of the things we often identify is that they actually usually have more systems than they think they do. They're just not documented. And so a system that lives in your head isn't much use to anyone else, but the good news is that the system exists. So getting it documented, that is a small hurdle to have to go over. But sometimes you just don't even have any systems.

The biggest thing that I find is mostly you don't have the documented systems or documented workflows, but you have a general workflow. Sometimes you don't have a system for a client journey though. If I ask you what your client journey looks like and you say, kind of depends. Sometimes I do this and then sometimes I do that. And then other times this happens, that is not a smooth client journey. And don't get me wrong, I get personalizing and customizing and everything's a little bit different. I do interior design work as well.

And even in my coaching, sometimes I structure things a little bit different, but one thing that I have learned is that the more I stick to the actual processes that we have and the way that we guide our clients through them, we are able to manage their expectations all along the way, the better the experience that they're going to have. So when I say no systems, I'm talking like you don't have any documented workflows, you don't have a standard client journey, you don't have a consistent pricing strategy.

Shauna Lynn Simon (08:46.946)

You just kind of pull numbers out of the air or you have a kind of sort of system, but it only makes sense to you. And everything just lives in your head. You cannot sell what isn't transferable. So the next thing that I say, would say helps tends to make a business unsellable is an emotional identity attachment. Now, if you're a home stage or listening to this one, this one's going to especially resonate with you, I think, because think about what we do on a daily basis as home stage. So for those who don't know, I had a

previous life as a home stager for about 15 years, operated a top producing home staging business. And one of the things that we're doing as a home stager is we're helping the sellers at their homes to disconnect personally and emotionally from their actual home. And this is exactly what we need to do with our business. You know, you have this emotional identity attachment to like, this is my baby. No one else can do it like me. And if I'm not a stage or if I'm not an interior designer, if I'm not a marketing creative, I don't know who I am.

that's going to lead to a fear of letting that go. And this is going to create an unsellable business because if you feel like no one else can do it like you can, then you're not going to build the team, the structure, the systems and processes to support the work that you do. Because if you say that everything's just a creative flow and you just kind of figure things out as you go and every day is a little bit different, that's great. But if there isn't something that someone else can follow, the day that you can't do this anymore is the day that you lose your revenue stream, plain and simple.

Buyers don't necessarily want you and your personality, but they do need the structure and the things that are inside your head. So the next thing, and these are in no particular order, I should say, this is not ranked in order of how I see these things. These are just kind of, let's say I've got six items here that talks about kind of like what I'm seeing in unsellable businesses. And the next one is financials. And this is a big one. I see this constantly. Financials are a mess. And what I want you to understand is that you can't go back and fix

previous financials. Once you file those tax returns, you're not going back and fixing your financials. What do I mean by fixing financials? What do I mean by financials are a mess? Well, there's different variations of how this looks. For some, it's literally like receipts in a shoe box. And I'm going to assume that most people who are listening to this podcast, you're usually making at least five, six figures, possibly seven figures. So chances are you have some sort of accounting system, whether you're doing it yourself or you have a bookkeeper CPA.

Shauna Lynn Simon (11:13.73)

That's step one is getting that accounting system. But step two is making sure that your books are easy and clear for someone to read. If you have things like a miscellaneous account that you just throw a bunch of expenses into each month, that's not going to be clear for someone else. If you pile all of your marketing expenses together, but you can't really identify what they were all for, even behind the scenes. So it might not be clear on your P&L, but you should have the accounts broken down behind the scenes. That's going to be helpful.

Maybe you have a couple of different businesses rolled up into one and all of the revenue and the expenses are all kind of just melded together. Or maybe you're running personal expenses through the business. Ooh, big no-no on that one. Unless, mean, I shouldn't say that. It's not as black and white, I suppose, as that, but this is not intended to be a financial conversation about how to get your books in order. I will save that for a whole other episode where I will bring on a very special guest to help with that.

When I'm talking about your personal finances, I'm talking about things that are not related to the business whatsoever that you're running through the business. So that's a little bit about what's going to make your financials look a little messy and unclear to a potential buyer. So ideally you want to have a minimum of two, preferably three years of what we call clean financials. And like I said, you can't go backwards. So if you're thinking of selling in a few years, let's start now.

Go book a meeting with your CPA, your bookkeeper, say, hey, I'm thinking about selling my business in a few years. What do I need to know from a book standpoint? Or if you have any questions, of course, get in touch with me as well. This is something I'm literally working on with other clients. The next one is that your pricing isn't standardized. It's a guess. You need to have a standardized pricing system. Even if there's still a little bit of massaging and guesswork that goes into it, you need to have a system of some sort that

tells you what your price in each item as, but ideally what I'm going to tell you what buyers really want to see. They want to see that you actually know how much profit you're making on individual job. They want to see how much profit you're making each year. And even if you're not, if you don't think you're profitable, there's a chance that you actually are more profitable than you think you are, even if the numbers aren't showing. And again, there's ways of understanding what a buyer is going to be reading in your financials. That's a whole other conversation.

Shauna Lynn Simon (13:27.374)

But I want you to if your pricing isn't standardized and it's just a guess, you don't know how much money you're making on that. You don't know what your overhead is. And it goes back to your messy financials again. The other thing that I see that makes a business unsellable is having no real brand. So people like I don't even have a website. I have an Instagram account, but I don't really even post on it. I just do everything through referral. That's great. But those referrals are coming to you. What happens when you leave the business now? So you want to make sure that you have an actual brand identity beyond just an Instagram account.

So setting up that website, creating a real presence, setting up your Google profile and making sure that people can actually find you and build some traction. Even if you're still getting your business through referrals, this will allow another potential opportunity to increase the traffic for your business. I'm not telling you got to do all the things for marketing that you don't need to be posted on social media every day or running meta ads or any of those types of things. I'm just saying you need to have a greater presence.

So let Google start finding you, start building up a little bit of SEO juice on there, get some reviews and testimonials, because again, that's going to help when it comes to transferring that business. Okay, so now that we've talked about the things that I'm seeing that are making a business unsellable, let's talk about some things that make a business sellable. And you're probably thinking like, that's kind of the reverse of those items. And in some cases it is, but I think I've got four items I'm going to cover here that...

I really want to touch on that. think make things most important. So the first one is documented processes. So again, we've already talked about the flip side of this, but what does it actually look like to have documented processes? This means having what we call SOPs or standard operating procedures. Your standard operating procedures are essentially a manual of how to do all the things in your business. So those things that you do on a regular basis that are just kind of muscle memory for you, you're going to document those and write them down.

Now, before you say, that sounds so daunting. How am I possibly going to do that? You don't have to be the one who actually writes them down. They just need to get documented. You might create a voice note and audio note and have it transcribed. You might hire a VA to help you with some of these things. You might just do everything as a video and throw those all somewhere that someone else can find them. But they need to be documented somehow. So you got your SOPs. This means having some templates in place. Let's not recreate the wheel every single time.

Shauna Lynn Simon (15:41.29)

Having a standard way that you create proposals and you send proposals, having templates for them, but not just templates for the proposals themselves, but also the whole journey of like the email that you send out when you send out a proposal, all of that. It means having pricing calculators to able to figure out your pricing. It means having communication systems. What does that look like? A communication system is not only like the medium that you're using. So is it emails, is text, is it phone, but it's also the way that you're communicating when you're communicating.

how you're phrasing things to the clients. What are some important things that you're providing? So this means creating maybe some standardized messaging, some standardized email templates that you're either copying and pasting each time or putting it into an automated workflow system as well. Your buyer wants clarity of your processes. So the more you can show them, the better. Then I also want you to keep this in mind. The more you have this documented, the easier it is to train other people to do elements of your job. So you might think like, but I do all the things in my job or I always have to do this.

I will tell you there are certain tasks that I am the only one who does them and I don't foresee anyone else doing them, but I still documented the process for it. You know why? Because I don't want to have to remember it, especially if it's something I'm only doing once a month, once a quarter, or even once a year. So the more you can start documenting these processes, the better. Quick little pro tip on this one though, is you're not going to sit down one day and say, today's the day I'm going to document all my SOPs. No, just the next time you go to do something, document it.

You can create a little screen share video as you're creating your next invoice. You can record a little audio note the next time you have a client conversation, sales conversation that you want to document. You can create a little email template after you send an email to a client, say like, I'm going to use this as a template next time I send the same email. It's really that simple. Okay. So the next thing that's going to help to make your business sellable is by having a repeatable client experience. And again, this kind of goes back to your processes, right? We talked about the client journey.

If it changes every single time, if there's a lack of consistency there, that's going to be disruptive for you, for the clients and make it very difficult for you to train anyone else to be able to do this. So what is a repeatable client experience look like? It means that you have defined brand standards. This is your quality control. What does this look like? And we think about this in terms of products all the time of what quality control looks like, but why don't...

Shauna Lynn Simon (18:02.734)

Why wouldn't we have that for service-based businesses? And I will tell you, the most successful businesses, they do have these brand standards. So what is your bare minimum of this is good enough? What sets you apart and makes you exceed the client's expectations? How are you creating predictable outcomes for your clients? How are you building consistency into your client experience? A sellable business produces predictable results. When people are investing in a service,

There's a specific outcome or objective that they are looking to achieve. And you need to be able to show how you get that every single time. And ideally measure that as well. That's how you know you have a repeatable client experience. Get those testimonials, get those reviews. The next one is having brand equity that goes beyond you as in it is transferable. So it's brand recognition that doesn't hinge on you specifically. It's the relationships that yes, you've built.

But those are relationships with your company, not just with you personally. It's having a strong referral pipeline and having a digital footprint. Again, we talked about having that website, having that Google profile. Those are things that are actually transferable. The brand should have weight independent of its founder. And then the last one I'm going to talk about in this section that makes a business really sellable that is going to be probably.

Pretty straightforward for you in terms of like, of course, she's saying this. Of course, this is obvious. This is a no brainer. It's financial clarity. How much did I hype on that already? It doesn't need to be perfect, but your buyers are going to want to see a revenue history. And frankly, you should know your revenue history. You should know what your business is making. You should know what your margins look like. You should understand your numbers. You don't necessarily have to have them off the top of your head. You don't have to have them memorized.

but you should know exactly where to get them. You should be looking at them regularly. You should be reading the story that they're telling. And if you don't know the story they're telling, go back and listen to my episode with Zahra where she talks about the three things that you need to be paying attention to when it comes to your financials and start paying attention to them. Start implementing what Zahra is talking about. And I can promise you, you're already a step in the right direction towards this financial clarity. A business that knows its numbers is safer to acquire. What a buyer is looking to do is eliminate risk.

Shauna Lynn Simon (20:21.954)

And let's think about it. Don't you want to eliminate risk as well? You want to eliminate as much uncertainty as you possibly can, and you can get that clarity from your numbers. Alright, now before we go any further, we're just gonna take a quick break and I'll see you back here in just a moment. We'll be right back after this quick message. This episode of the Real Women Real Business podcast is brought to you by, well, potentially you. Are you a brand or service that supports passionate female entrepreneurs who are ready to turn their vision into profit?

without the stress and overwhelm? Perhaps you're an accidental CEO yourself, now on a mission to make work and life easier for fellow passion-driven boss ladies. Our podcast is experiencing an exciting 30 % month-over-month growth, reaching entrepreneurs who are building stronger, working smarter, and dreaming bigger. We have limited partnership opportunities available for brands that align with our mission of redefining how working hard looks and feels.

Visit aboutshaunalynn.com/partner to learn more about becoming a partner in our rapidly growing show. And welcome back to the Real Women Real Business Podcast.

Shauna Lynn Simon (21:31.886)

Alright, welcome back to the Real Women Real Business podcast where we're talking about what it takes to create a sellable business and the great side effect of creating a sellable business. Because if you're thinking like, I'm going to tune this out right now because I'm not planning on selling my business for a few years. I'll come back in a few years when I'm ready to sell. Well, the great thing is about preparing your business now for sale is that it also makes you more money now. But then the other part of that is that you actually need to be thinking about selling your business at least

two years in advance ideally in order to really maximize it in order to ensure that you've got the right things in place. So why should you build this way even if you never sell? Well, I've kind of already talked about this a little bit because building a sellable business is going to help you to reduce your burnout. It's going to help you to, it's going to help to force more clarity in the way that you do things. And what I love about the clarity that this brings is it also helps you to challenge some of the ways that you're doing things.

If you've been kind of coasted along and just doing things the same way all the time, just because that's how you've always done it, it's really easy to get stale in your business and potentially lose some of your market share. But if you are constantly reevaluating and reviewing your processes and how you're doing things, it's amazing the ideas that you can come up with. You can be innovative, you can be a leader in your field because you are so on top of this. It also helps to make delegation so much easier.

And we've talked about this in several different episodes on this podcast. And of course, if you've taken any of my trainings, we've probably talked about delegation. And I think a lot of people think of delegation of like, I have to hire this big team, but that's not necessarily what it looks like. The reality is that a lot of us are spending our time and me included, I continue to catch myself on what can I delegate today? What no longer belongs on my plate? Because we're spending our time on $20 an hour tasks when we should be.

spend our time on the $300 an hour tasks, right? So the more we can get in place now, the easier it is to delegate. So even if you're like, really don't have the funds right now, great. Think of how easy it's going to be when you do. Growth can happen unexpectedly. I was speaking with someone on the podcast just recently, actually it's an upcoming episode, I apologize, it's an upcoming episode. And she was sharing how an influencer shared her product and all of a sudden scale.

Shauna Lynn Simon (23:48.692)

sales just skyrocketed and absolutely boomed and she was completely unprepared for it. So imagine that happens to you. Don't you want to be ready for that kind of growth? You need to be able to easily delegate. And so the better you can prepare your business now behind the scenes allows you to create that sellable business. It also helps you to increase your profitability. You're going to be running things that much more efficiently. You're going to, again, got that clarity. Now you're really looking at things

through a different lens, you're looking at things more frequently and you're going to identify things before they become a bigger issue. The sooner you can find an inefficiency or a mistake in your system, the better it is. I taught a class in Las Vegas a couple of years ago and it was all about profitability and just being able to pay attention to your expenses. And I understand the bigger the business gets, you're like, might not be reading line by line every item. Sure, but someone in your business

absolutely darn well should be, okay? So when you are building a sellable business, you know what every single item on your P&L statement is. And so I had someone in this class say to me that they finally took a look at their numbers. It was shortly before this class and they were kind of sharing the here's what not to do kind of story. They said, we weren't paying attention to our numbers for years. Money was just always there. So we weren't really paying attention to was coming and going.

And surely they had an accountant and they were getting reports and everything else, but they weren't looking at what they were spending their money on. And when they reviewed it, they identified an expense for something they were no longer using that they had been paying. I think it was like $600 a month, every single month for several months that they didn't need to be spending this money anymore. Now, for some people, 600 bucks a month is a drop in the bucket. For other people, that's your rent payment. So how does it?

How would you feel if you were losing money on something that you could have been avoiding? How many of us sign up for different software programs and it bills us every month and we're not really utilizing it? Like, I'll use it next month. I'll use it next month. We want to pay attention to these. All of that helps to increase our profitability. The more we're paying attention to those things and then creating a business now that's going to be sellable later provides you with options and options really is power. You're not building the business to exit.

Shauna Lynn Simon (26:04.514)

but you're building it so you could, if you needed to, if you wanted to, you've got a profitable business that you can sell. You can have that legacy to your business as well. And that changes how you build your business today, how you lead your business today and the conversations you're having with your team. Now, to be clear, I do not suggest, and I talk about this in the bootcamp that I actually run. I run a sell your staging business bootcamp. If you're interested, feel free to reach out to me. I'll give you details about our next cohort, but I don't suggest

talking to your team and saying like, hey, I'm planning on selling the business soon. Do not do that. But you can certainly express to the team that listen, at some point this business might be sold and I want to make sure that you are all well set up for a great transition to a buyer who's going to treat you the same way that I do, possibly even better for that matter. So there's nothing wrong with sharing with your team that you are doing this to create a sellable business, but make it clear to them, we're not selling now.

I just wanna know that someday that's going to be an option so that we can all grow this business together and ensure that we're really putting our efforts into something that's going to be sustainable long-term and that's gonna be here long-term, no matter what that looks like. You probably know a business in your local area that has been around for generations and it's literally passed through the family. Not everyone has those, we don't see businesses really passing through generations in the same way, mainly because the next generation doesn't always wanna do the same things that we were doing.

So we wanna make sure that we are creating it for the person in that generation who does, even if they're not related for us or related to us, because we wanna ensure that we've got that legacy, that that business gets to continue on. So I stepped back from staging a few years back, back in 2023, and I made the decision not to sell the business. And there was, I could go on for days about the reason for that decision.

But one of the biggest things was that I was maintaining my interior design business and I wanted to maintain my client list and the brand that came with it. I wanted to be able to still filter my referral sources. Like that was a big part of my referral sources. I had also only recently rebranded the design division to be operating under its own umbrella. So was still establishing that brand. And part of me considered keeping the staging business for a few more years to make it a little bit more sellable, divide those two businesses a little bit more.

Shauna Lynn Simon (28:24.734)

But ultimately, based on some of the life situations that I was navigating, it made the most sense to sell the staging business at that time. I made the mistake of talking to my team about it. And my team was very upfront and flat out. We do not want to be part of a sale. If you sell the business, we're gone. We're not going to stick around for it. So now I'm selling a business that doesn't have any actual operations. And I had not been operating the business myself for a great deal of time at this point.

I was doing a lot of things behind the scenes still. was still CEO of the business, but I wasn't a part of the day-to-day executing of the individual services of the staging business. And so while I think I had a very sellable business, we had documented systems, we had great profitability. The books could have used a little bit of cleaning as well. So when I started taking a look at that, I realized even though I had separated the revenue and the expenses as much as possible a few years before that,

My bookkeeper hadn't done it quite as cleanly as I had hoped. And there were still a lot of things that were unclear and kind of thrown into miscellaneous. So I would need a couple of years to clean that stuff up. And I wasn't overly prepared to be doing that. So I had a ton of brand equity in the business that ultimately I decided to keep for myself and use in another business. Do I have any regrets about that? Honestly, some days, yeah. Some days I wonder what I could have actually sold the business for.

By the time I was ready to leave, I wasn't willing to put in the effort to really get it to the state that it needed to be in. I mean, further to that story is that simply that back in pre-COVID, I was planning on selling the business in a few years and then COVID hit and we did a lot of restructuring. And so by the time things kind of started back up again, I just wasn't willing to put that effort into things. originally I did have the plan back in about 2020 to put in a three year

to spend three years preparing it for sale. And by the time those three years were up, I was like, I just of just went out at this point. I hadn't had the time to actually put things in place that I had hoped because of all the changes that COVID had brought. Anyway, at the end of the day, this is not about my story of what I did with my business. Like I said, I learned some great lessons from it, but I've been helping other stages to navigate this. And I've also helped buyers to buy staging businesses as well, or to evaluate a business that they're planning on buying.

Shauna Lynn Simon (30:42.008)

so they can have a nice smooth transition. And there's a very big difference between operating a business and building a transferable asset. And one thing that I've realized in doing this is that in all honesty, it's incredibly common to be operating in unsellable business. But I wanna change that. And I wanna change the conversation that we're having around this. It's been fascinating to see how much stronger a business can become when the systems are clear.

It also becomes very obvious which businesses are going to be built to last and which ones are going to be built around a personality. And so I want to help people build more businesses to last, even if it outlasts them and what they're doing. So I do have a bootcamp, as I mentioned, for home stages specifically. And I may decide to open this up to other professionals at some point, but for right now it is just for stages. But if you are a professional who is not a home stage and you're thinking, well, like I can really use some help creating a sellable business.

That is actually exactly what the Real Women Real Business Mastery Program does. It's our group coaching program. It's a 12 month program and it helps to ensure that you have a solid foundation in all these areas and your pricing and your systems and processes and your efficiencies, your productivity, as well as helping to ensure that you're maintaining your own health and wellness throughout this. We're building a sustainable business that is built for growth and built to sell. We don't necessarily cover specifically all the ins and outs of actually selling a business.

in the training program. And so again, it's a group coaching program that is kind of paired with not kind of it is paired with on-demand training as well. And so we do cover a great deal of information, but we're not necessarily going through the ins and outs of the selling process for your exit strategy. But we do make sure that you are definitely ready to sell. Now, if you are a home stager and this is resonating with you and you're thinking like, I might want to be ready to sell in two, three, five plus years, then I want you to take a look at how

How sellable is your business right now? And I've got a great ebook for you to actually evaluate it through the lens of a buyer, help you to understand who the buyers are currently for staging businesses, what it is that they're looking for and how to ensure that you have a sellable business for them. So to grab this ebook, you're simply going to go to styledlistedsold.com/sellready That's "SELLREADY". And then you're also going to use that code "SELL READY"

Shauna Lynn Simon (33:04.814)

at checkout and you're get 20 % off of that ebook as well. And we're gonna have that for a limited time. So get that ebook before we raise the price on it. But right now you can get 20 % off of that. And so this will help you if you've got a home staging business that you're saying like, wanna create that sellable business, this will help you. If you are not a staging business, this can still be a very valuable resource and it's relatively inexpensive. So feel free to go and check it out.

But I would suggest instead, if you are not a home staging business and you want to explore how sellable your business is and what tools you should be putting in place, let's have a call. So feel free to book a call with me at aboutshaunalynn.com/coachme and we'll have a call. And interestingly enough, I happen to be currently representing a business in the Waterloo region that is available for sale. It's a staging brand, not the full operating business. It is a staging brand that is available.

And this is a real life case study of what happens when a business is built with structure from day one. So if you're local and thinking about entering into this industry, there may be a faster way for you to start a business than starting from scratch. And this is also an important note to think about is, why would someone want to buy my business? You know what it was, what it took to build your business, right? Well, what if someone could bypass that by just buying into the business and especially for those who are, are located in the United States. So this podcast, of course, reaches all over the world.

I primarily work with people in North America, both in Canada and the US. In the US, there is actually a great deal of financing options available for people who are interested in investing and purchasing a business. I'm not going to get into all the ins and outs of that here, I want you to be aware of that in case you're thinking to yourself, well, no one's going to have the money to buy the business for the price that I actually want to sell it for. You'd be surprised. And if you think about how much money you spent in the first couple of years of your business, how much your time

much time you spend. you put a dollar value on the time that you spend, what if someone just had the funds to invest that to be able to kind of skip the line a little bit and instead of starting from scratch, they get to build a business much, much faster. And so they can take the business from where you leave off and build it beyond that. Now, of course, like I said, if you're not located in Waterloo region, I do work with people all across North America. So if you are looking

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for if you're looking to sell your staging business or if you're looking to buy a staging business, reach out to me. I'm connected to a lot of people. I'm happy to make some introductions if that's something that's possible as well. And again, if you're not a stager, but you're thinking about selling your business, I may not have the right connections necessarily for someone who's interested in buying your business, but I am certainly well connected within the mergers and acquisitions world. And I can certainly point you in the right direction if I'm not the best fit for your particular circumstances.

So go to aboutshaunalynn.com/coachme Or of course you can catch me on Instagram @shaunalynnsimon as well. Even if you never plan to sell, build your business like someone is watching, build your business like someone could step into it tomorrow. Alright, that's it for today's episode. I truly hope that you've enjoyed it. I know it was a little bit of a different spin on things today, but I hope that this really resonated with you. And if it did,

I hope that you will continue to allow me to join you on your journey. Each week we drop new episodes every Tuesday morning at 7 a.m. Eastern time. Don't forget to drop us a review on your favorite podcast platform and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcast. And of course, it's always the best way to not only show your support for this show and all that we do here, but also for your fellow women entrepreneurs is to share this podcast with someone that you know needs to hear this.

Again, even if they're not planning on selling their business tomorrow, we want to make sure they're building it to sell so that they can be enjoying the riches of that legacy. So share this with someone that you know is going to benefit from it. It helps us. It's going to help them. And that's how we continue to raise up the women in our industries. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Until next time, keep thriving.