If you want to sell your business, a buyer is brutally objective in evaluating your assets, and will have concerns and doubts.

Equipment starting to wear out or is not the latest model won't fetch top price.  A lease with an expiry inside two years, and the potential for a big jump in the rent, where is the location value?  What about staff who will probably leave when you do?  Is the existing client list pretty attractive?

All of these assets are valuable to you because that is how you work, but a buyer is likely to discount them heavily.  That means sellers are often very disappointed in the sale prices finally achieved.

What a buyer really values is a marketing and sales system that generates profits.  This means a system to generate quality leads, achieve a high conversion rate with a good margin, a high level of retention of those customers, and, that the system does not rely on you for results.

A typical business valuation is around twice net profit after fair owner remuneration.  Franchises, which do have marketing systems in place, often attract four times net profit.  The more systematised the business, the higher the valuation.

Where do you start?  Don't just copy what the competitor over the road does, copy what the best operators do.  Usually a few things will produce most of the results, yes it can take a while to test and see which ones these are, but it is also possible they won't need a massive budget either.

Even if you don't plan to sell, it's pretty attractive to have a marketing machine.  You'll know where the sales will come from, your team will be busy selling and so not on Facebook, sales will be made even if you're not there, and you can put even more time into growing the business and profits.

It doesn't take a lot of time to evaluate the current system, decide on targets, work out what needs to be done, implement, and keep testing to improve.  We help- our clients do this with our system for Profit Improvement.

When you make sure your business is a marketing machine, the investment pays for itself many times over, year after year.