Is it time to leave?

You know how it feels when you are at a party and the host starts to clean up. It is a subtle message that the party is over and it is time to leave. Sometimes we don’t get the hint and either the host starts to show people the door, or they decide to just hold on and see how late the last guest will stay.

How long have you had your business? How long do you want to continue working the way you have been working? Do you have someone to take it over, a child, a spouse? You don’t want to just walk out and let your business end, do you? Is the party over for you, but the other people are still having fun?

We often times hold on to things way longer than we should. Just look at any of the “reality” TV shows where they help hoarders out or the rare “barn find” you always hear about. Most of the time that person who owns the property or item held on to it for a long time and now that they are motivated to get rid of it, they can’t really enjoy the benefits of the sale.

Time is the same for everyone. It will not stop, it will not slow, so what you decide to do with your time is very important. You should do an audit of your time and look through what it is you enjoy doing and ask if owning the business is something you truly enjoy. Maybe you still want to have a space there, but don’t want to deal with all the stress of being the owner and manager. In that case maybe you could set up a partnership or sell the majority of the interest in the business and just hold on to enough so that you have something to do.

Another option is to set up a professional management team that does the “hard” work while you enjoy those parts of the business that got you started in the first place. I have seen many businesses grow beyond what the founder intended because they decided it was time to step out of the day to day management and just stayed tinkering.

What if what you enjoyed the most out of your business was building it up? Maybe that is what you like doing and let’s face it there are plenty of serial entrepreneurs that do just that. They may be at a different scale than you, but they in essence go out, build a company, run it for a while and then sell it. They then take that money and start a new one.

How do you figure out that it is time to leave? Like I said above, you do an inventory of what it is you like and don’t like about the business. Maybe there are things you are not doing that your staff is always complaining about, that someone should do. If those are piling up, then it may be a good time to go.

This is not an easy process. This is not something you do at breakfast one day on the back of a napkin. This requires work and effort to really understand what you are contemplating doing.

If you are having thoughts about selling your business and don’t know how, or maybe how to set up a professional management team to take over, please drop us a line at rick@gramatges.com. We can work through a plan of detailing what you love, hate and are OK with in your business and maybe find that it is time to walk away.