Quinn Driscoll Of Value Gal Coaching & Consulting: Five Things You Need To Know If You Want To Build, Scale and Prepare Your Business For a Lucrative Exit

An Interview With Jason Hartman

Try on investor glasses. If you want to sell your business, you have to understand how a potential buyer is going to see your company from the other side. Taking an objective look at the strengths and weaknesses of your company will help you identify areas for improvement.

As a part of our series about “Five Things You Need To Know If You Want To Build, Scale and Prepare Your Business For a Lucrative Exit, I had the pleasure of interviewing Quinn Driscoll.

Quinn Driscoll, CPA/ABV is a business coach and money mentor. She is known for her signature Cash Flow Confidence coaching program that is equal parts informational and inspirational. Quinn brings ten years of experience as a sought-after financial expert witness who worked in the high-stakes world of litigation consulting. She now helps business owners tackle money stress, money systems, and money strategy.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I started my career in a traditional Big 4 accounting firm. A few years ago, I had been working as a financial expert witness for ten years, helping hundreds of business owners work through money and valuation issues in legal disputes. Business valuation is a similar concept to real estate appraisal, except for companies instead of properties. It was amazing experience but eventually two things started to wear on me.

First, being an expert witness involved battling the actual worst nightmare of a perfectionist like me, which is being wrong. The stakes are high too, because there is usually a person who is hired by your opponent to find and prove everything you did wrong.

Second, if there is one thing TV gets right about courtroom shows like The Good Wife, it’s drama! I decided to shift my focus to helping business owners turn down the volume of drama and money stress in their businesses and their brains. So I created my coaching programs for business owners, drawing on my expertise with valuation.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

As I shifted into coaching and away from litigation consulting, I wanted to build a strong digital presence. This meant I had to learn social media marketing and sales very quickly, which was a total foreign language to me. I definitely received more than one message from my sister (one of my few followers) saying “What are you trying to do with this link/tag/post? That’s not how Instagram works.”

I learned that if I think of new things I’m trying as practice, it makes me feel better about doing it wrong the first few times.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

The life lesson quote that comes to mind immediately is “If you can’t get out of it, get into it.” There are so many times in life when we resist change or complain about things we can’t control. The best thing to do after getting your frustration out is to flip your thoughts from “This is the worst” to “How can I make the best of this?”

Ok super. Thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. Can you tell us a story about how you were able to build a business from scratch, scale and sell it to a bigger firm?

I am currently in the process of building and scaling my financial coaching business. Over the years I have advised hundreds of small business owners on value drivers and how to maximize the value of their companies, so they can exit in style.

Based on your experience, can you share with our readers the “Five Things You Need To Know If You Want To Build, Scale and Prepare Your Business For a Lucrative Exit”. Please give a story or example for each.

1. Try on investor glasses. If you want to sell your business, you have to understand how a potential buyer is going to see your company from the other side. Taking an objective look at the strengths and weaknesses of your company will help you identify areas for improvement.
2. Get strategic about cash flow, risk and growth. These are the big three qualitative elements that impact value for most companies. Where you’ve been is important, but if you want to get top dollar when you exit your business, you need to paint the picture of where the company is going. What opportunities have you been able to capitalize on, and what new opportunities are you pursuing? Have you identified the risks that have the greatest impact on your business, and what have you done to mitigate them?
3. Focus on transferability. Think about how easy or difficult it would be to package up your business, tie it with a bow, and hand it off to a new owner. Would they be able to get the same financial results? Or take what you’ve built and launch new growth easily? If a buyer sees too many obstacles to achieve the results they want, it makes your business less attractive and less valuable.
4. Prove it. Get data that proves your claims about how much better you are than the competition or industry standards. I’ve worked with hundreds of businesses and I can’t recall one owner saying “We’re pretty mediocre on customer service.” Everyone thinks they go above and beyond. If that’s a big differentiator for you, how can you prove it?
5. It’s never too early to plan for the exit. Recent statistics from the Exit Planning Institute indicate that only 20% — 30% of businesses that go to market actually sell. Proper planning along the way will set you up to be way ahead of the competition. You will understand what drivers make the biggest difference on the financial success of your business. The bonus benefit is that you have a better understanding of your business and you get to maximize the benefits for yourself as well.

In your experience, is there a difference in approach for building a service based business versus a product based business when you have the intent to eventually sell the business. Can you explain?

In my experience, the seller of a service-based business needs to be really aware of how transferable relationships and processes are. If you have an assembly-line type of product-based business, it is easy to see how you could swap out people and get the same job done. If you have a service-based business, the personal touch is usually the differentiator. It’s important to think through how you recreate that if a particular person is no longer with the company after the sale.

How does one go about the process of finding a buyer?

There are so many possibilities when it comes to finding a buyer. A good first step would be identifying potential buyers like competitors or complementary businesses in the industry, or people within the company like key employees who might be interested. Business brokers are also well versed in the market of potential buyers.

How can one decide if it is better to build a business in order to exit, or if it is better to stick around for the long term and let the company bring in residual income, or if it is better to go public?

This is going to be different for everyone. The great thing is if you build a business that has value, you are going to have options.

Think of the value of a business as a Venn diagram. The selling price for a business is in the area where the two circles, one representing the seller’s idea of value and one representing the buyer’s idea of value, overlap.

If you want to sell, the expectations of both the buyer and seller need to be aligned so an agreement can be reached. In some situations, a potential buyer might be able to fold the company into its operations and create efficiencies. In that case you might get a higher price that would make it worthwhile to let go of the income, even if that wasn’t your intention.

Going public is a completely different situation that involves a lot more scrutiny and regulation than selling in the private market. According to the Small Business Administration, 99.9% of businesses in the U.S. have fewer than 500 employees. Going public is a viable option for a tiny fraction of companies.

Can you share a few ways that are used to determine a good selling price for the business?

Depending on the type of business, the selling price might be based simply on the value of the physical assets the company owns (like manufacturing equipment or real estate). For many companies it will be based on the present value of the future income the company is expected to generate. Certain industries may have simplified multiples of earnings, like EBITDA, or a percentage of revenue that provide general guidelines.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I love this question! I want to inspire and empower business owners, especially women in male-dominated fields (like myself), to take control of their money and improve their financial literacy. I would love more positive messaging, and less fear-based messaging, in the financial services industry.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

The best place to find me is on Instagram @valuegalquinn

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.