How to Sell Your Online Business for More by Becoming Redundant
The less involved you are in your business, the more valuable it becomes.
It’s your business. You’re responsible for running everything, right?
This is a belief that many online entrepreneurs share, simply because they’re anxious about trusting someone else or a piece of software to handle operations for them.
When you started out, you were probably handling everything. You were the salesperson, accountant, marketer, content writer, inventory manager, software developer, and more.
Once you’ve gotten the hang of everything and you’re able to spin all the plates by yourself while spending 50–60 hours per week on your business, it’s time to bring in help.
Entrepreneurs find recruiting help to run their business difficult, but doing everything yourself keeps you stuck in the business. You’re effectively trapped working a full-time job that you’ve created for yourself.
There’s only so much that one person can do. You will reach a limit where you can’t grow the business further because you simply lack the physical capacity to do so.
There’s one thing that will help you get out of the hamster wheel and have it running without you: solid processes.
The more experience you have with your business, the more you’ll see that you have repeatable processes to run it. Once you have these processes, you can bring in virtual assistants (VAs), salespeople, accountants, marketers, developers, and other staff who can handle them for you. In truth, if they’re skilled, they’ll be able to run these processes better than you can.
Become Redundant, Increase Your Online Business’ Value
Buyers of online businesses aren’t looking to buy a full-time job. Big-money investors, such as high-net-worth individuals and family offices, don’t see your online business as a business; they see it as an asset.
When you start to view your business as an asset, it helps you improve it and make it more scalable.
Why? Because you start to build your business to the point where it runs as efficiently as possible with minimal input from yourself. When you have rock-solid systems that enable anyone to come in and learn to run an operation within your business, your business has become scalable.
How to Systemize Your Operations
There are three core elements of efficient business systems.
Automation
The first place you want to look when deciding how to automate your operations is your day-to-day repetitive tasks.
There are many software tools that can be used to automate these tasks, saving you a ton of time. Even if they’re paid subscriptions, they are worth it for the time you’ll save. Always remember: the less you work in the business, the more valuable it becomes.
For example, if you’re posting regularly on social media, you can use social media posting software to send posts to all your social media accounts in one go, instead of having to log in to each account individually.
You can even hire a developer at a low cost to create a custom tool for your website to automate a particular task, such as posting content. The cost of the developer will be almost nothing compared to how much time the tool will save you.
Always be thinking of ways to make your operations faster.
Processes
Everything you do to run the business needs a process. It makes operations more efficient and organized and prevents errors.
Your aim should be to create repeatable processes that, if followed correctly, should incur no errors. Doing so also prevents you from making the same mistakes over and over, as you won’t have to re-learn how to do a task.
A series of checklists is often very effective in ensuring that all necessary tasks within an operation are executed. You should make checklists with no more than eight bullet points; anything more than that is counter-productive because including too many checks to review will actually slow down operations.
People
Hiring employees is the most expensive element of creating efficient business systems, but it is also often the best way to grow your business.
You bring in employees once you have your automations and processes in place — unless you hire an operations manager to create your processes for you, that is. This can be an effective strategy if organizing isn’t one of your strengths.
Your automations and processes work together to make your employees more productive. Employees who are unproductive due to poor operational systems can cost you a lot. You want to make sure that you’re getting the best possible results from all of your employees, and this largely comes down to how well you’ve organized your operations.
The best way to get the most out of your employees is to create standard operating procedures (SOPs) for them to follow. Clear and comprehensive SOPs with instructional videos and written instructions massively reduce the chances of errors.
Then, you need to train your employees. The best way to do this is to use the skill transfer process.
First, you show the employee how to carry out the operation(s) they will be responsible for. Then, you have them explain to you how they will do it to clarify their understanding of the processes. Then, you watch them carry out the operation. After that, they continue to conduct the operation(s) without your supervision.
You can have an employee create SOPs once they’ve been working for a while, as they might see ways to make your business’ processes more efficient.
How Systemizing Increases Your Online Business Sale Price
Let me put it to you this way. Which investment is more attractive: A business making $10K per month where the owner works 60 hours per week, or a business making $6K per month where the owner works 2 hours per week?
An online business that requires less work is more attractive to a buyer not just because it’s less work for them; it’s also because the business is more scalable. Remember, investors are looking to make a return on investment (ROI) when they buy your business; they can’t do that if they spend all their time keeping the business afloat.
When you systemize your operations, you free up time for an investor to focus on business growth.
If you have hired good employees and allow them a bit of monitored freedom to help grow your business, then part of the scaling of your business can be automated. It would be prudent to keep a close eye on your employees when doing this, however, as once they gain more autonomy, they can make bigger mistakes.
Having efficient and automated operations within your business doesn’t just make it more attractive when thinking about how an investor could grow your business; it also increases your business’ value because you’ll earn more net profit.
You can increase your capacity to handle more sales. Plus, you have more time to put in place growth systems, such as marketing campaigns and expansion of the business by adding new revenue streams.
In summary, the less time you spend working on your business and the more money it makes, the more money you can sell it for.
If you’re curious as to what your online business is worth right now, then we have a free valuation tool you can use to receive a valuation figure in a matter of minutes.
