Guest Post by Debra Lloyd
I’ve been working with a young Mom recently – she should remain nameless but let’s call her Vicky.

She has a pretty decent Virtual Assistant business going and is very happy that it’s actually generating enough income to allow her to stay home with her two year old son and new baby daughter.

Her family is complete now, she has a boy, a girl and a business – one of each, just perfect!

Vicky’s a pretty smart cookie and has really done quite well so far…

But we’re working together to find ways for her to add skills and services she doesn’t have. And realistically, even if she did, she wouldn’t have the time to provide them anyway. So I’m sure you’re wondering why would she be looking for more business if she can’t handle the extra work?

Vicky has a 5 year plan – you could call it an extended exit strategy.

Her long term plan is to do less of the service fulfillment herself and basically get to a point where she is mostly just sourcing work and delegating it to others, so she’s setting herself up as a sort of ‘admin concierge’.

By adding other skill sets to her range of services she becomes more valuable to her clients. As they already know and trust her, she helps them (and herself) by making sure they don’t need to go look for someone else to handle their payroll or accounting needs.

Her clients have a one stop shop for more or most of their admin needs… and she has more business.

So What’s With The 5 Year Plan?

Vicky really likes what she does and fully expects to still like it in five years, but that’s a long time that goes by real fast. By then, her kids will be 7 and 5 they’ll both be in school and she’s thinking that’ll have an impact on how she manages her time inside and outside of the business.

She and I are working to set up her business now, so that she’ll be ‘properly positioned’ to sell it, if and when she gets to a point where she wants to.

What Exactly Does ‘Positioned To Sell’ Mean?

It’s just like deciding to sell your house, you need to address the curb appeal – put your house in order and have it looking its best before you throw an open house.

It’s a fact that most small and even medium sized business owners are so busy running or trying to grow their businesses, they don’t have time to think about what they’ll need to do if they ever decide to sell it.

That’s a crying shame because thinking about it from the get go is actually what will help maximize what you can sell for, if and when the time comes that you want to. In the meantime though, taking care of the things that will help you sell the business, in most cases are the very same things that will help you realize bigger profits while you still own it. Now that sounds like a win-win to me.

Whether you’re making $10 a week or $1,000 a day (gosh – if you’re that last one, I really hope you’re taking care of this stuff already) start right now to get your ducks in line.

Use this check list to be sure you’re set up and positioned to sell by addressing each of these elements of your business – because you never know when selling may be exactly what you want or need to do:

• Net Profit
• URL History
• Website Design
• Content Quality
• SERP’s Ranking
• Vendor Relationships
• Shipping & Delivery Method
• Customer Database
• Marketing Systems
• Social Media Engagement
• Visitor Volume
• Traffic Sources
• Keywords & Rankings
• Hours Required to Run
• Ease of Transfer
• Training
• Growth Opportunities

I don’t want to put Lynn’s readers to sleep here as this can be pretty dry stuff. But I guarantee paying attention to this will put money (I’m a Brit and I love alliteration – I so want to say Pounds) in your pocket and profit in your P&L.

And if you ever do sell your business down the road it’ll make the process easier and very likely increase what the price you can ask as a result of doing it.

If you’re like me, (a little OCD) or just want to see a more detailed explanation of how to track each of these items, there’s a series of posts on my blog at NextGenBizTools.com where you can learn exactly what and how to do that.