I don’t know you, but one thing I know is that being self-employed has been easy and highly profitable from the beginning of your self-employed journey. You have had incredible success, you were filled with passion and purpose along the way, and your staff or employees added so much value that sometimes it felt as though you had little or nothing to do because the employee’s competence trumped your abilities time and time again.
This led you to golf daily, spend time with our kids, coach the kiddos’ soccer team, build the kids a dream tree house, spend 2 hours a day at the gym making sure you are taking care of yourself, indulging in massages, manicures, and pedicures—catching up on all of those juicy magazines about Hollywood as you are pampered in the luxury of self-employment and enjoying it all.
Well anyways…. Go ahead and wake up from that dream because living this lie won’t bring you anything but an illusion. The truth is that becoming self-employed, and more importantly, staying in a position where you can not only manage the business and continue to grow towards freedom and financial success is very difficult. It’s not all roses and wonderful times. Let’s face it; if you have chosen self employment, you have paid your dues and have long forgotten about what it would be like to work a 40-hour work week.
Often people come to us and tell us “Who would buy our business? no one would want this thing!”
The truth is that most business owners have forgotten what they have done and why. They forget the hard times, the issues with employees, hiring, and firing, slow-paying customers, building the business on a shoestring budget, being there early and staying late. They forget the battle they took on to get the business where it is today, and most of the time they can’t fathom why someone would buy the business considering how tired and aged the business owner is at the time of considering to sell.
However, the blind spot the business owners often have is the new owner doesn’t have to go through what the original owner did. The new owner gets to move in and take over and make adjustments or increase the production from where it currently sits, but in no way shape or form do they have to start from scratch and do through the hell that the original owner withstood.
This is why businesses move- a new owner can bring new energy and passion to an (often worn down) business owner. Business owners are usually paid 2.5 to 5x the earnings.