Not being prepared for business exit, costs!

In this podcast Kaia Vincent talks to Cliff Spolander

Cliff is a business growth and exit specialist and the CEO of Business by Design, the UK’s leading exit planning advisory company. He is also the author of two books – The Smarter Exit and The Cash Flow Code.

Cliff’s on a mission to stop hard working SME business owners failing to exit their businesses successfully due to insufficient clarity and a lack of focused business, personal and financial plans. He is frustrated to see so many business owners working extremely hard but, when they come to exit, failing to realise a return on investment for all the years of effort. Furthermore, life is unpredictable so Cliff wants to see every owner being more prepared for unexpected life events, such as illness, a change in personal circumstances or maybe even death. Cliff is passionate about working with business owners to create a clear, focused and strategic exit plan for their business.

Drawing on insights from his downloadable '12 things to consider before selling your business' Cliff provides insight into when, how and why business owners should address the subject of business exit. 

The question is how do you exit, and when do you exit? The first issue is that a lot of business owners are so involved in their companies that exiting is way down the line and, although they need to prepare for exit, they don't always want to.

So, it's really about educating them that exit planning is not about selling your business, particularly, although selling is one way to exit, and it doesn’t mean that just because you are exit-ready in 2, 3, 4, 5 years’ time, you have to exit at that point.

All it means is that you are ready to exit should you need to.