The highest marker of success isn’t profit; it’s legacy.

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Stage seven, the succession stage, a legacy is born. Congratulations, it's been 36 months, you are now in a position to succeed your business. This is the ultimate success in business. As a matter of fact, many people believe the reason to start a business is to pass it along to sell it, to donate it, to reap the ongoing residual passive income that comes from it. So what is the personality of stage seven? You and your business are all things to all people. That's your personality, you have strong direction, and you'll notice there's a return to direction. In stage seven, you have a strong direction. You have robust sales, you have consistent systems, you have quality products and controls. You are an MVP business, you are an MVP organization, you're firing on all cylinders, you're giving people a level 10 experience in direction, income and interaction. Your systems and your controls, your internal customers, your employees, and their culture is a fulfilling experience for them. It aligns with their behaviors, with their values, and with their attributes.

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What keeps clients coming back over and over again?

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Stage Five, the sustainability stage, a franchise is born, whether formal or informal, you have created the type of business that has a 90% chance of success at this point. The business has cut the umbilical cord from the owner, expansion is now possible you have duplicated and replicated yourself and your systems they are running on their own at a high level. And it is because of the systems that you have developed, that your clients come back over and over and over again, as we mentioned, you can take a simple idea or product and refine it to the point that you create lifetime loyalty in your customers of the 20 working days in a month, and the 20 opportunities that the average Starbucks patron has to go to their store, they go 18 out of 20 times that is an incredible rate of loyalty and it's because of the significant experience that people have when they go to Starbucks. And the foundation of that is the certainty that they give. I'm going to get my latte frock a mappa cappuccino the same way every time and I'm going to have that significant consistent experience and that is what a franchise is all about. And that is what makes a business sustainable and can live beyond the owner.

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Remember working hard for little profit? Now you can expect the opposite!

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

When you are in stage six, you are unfairly and positively rewarded for your past efforts. What that means is people will overpay for your service way back when if you can even remember back to stage one and two and three. Sometimes you are working hard and being paid less. And you wonder, Oh, will this ever change? Will I ever get the reward for my business? Now you can't believe how much you're getting paid for how little you're doing. And this is the reward for managing stage three, stage four, stage five and sticking with it. You're at the saleability stage. You're in stage six, your A Star Is Born, you are about to go to stage seven. This is unchartered territory for 99% of the businesses out there. You've grown and developed a leadership team that will contribute to the value of the business.

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You know your business is salable when others want to buy it! Be prepared!

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

It's interesting that even if you do not have the goal to sell your business, when you're running, this good of a business and this profitable of a business people will offer to buy you. I remember back in my construction days, when we were building homes, we were building custom homes. And invariably during the course of construction, people would drive up even though the house was not for sale, and we were building it on contract for somebody else. People would come up and hand us their business card with a price on the back. And that price was an offer to buy the home. And when I told the prospective buyer that I was not the owner, they would ask me to pass that offer on to the owner to see if they would sell many times that offer was higher than what the business was worth. Sometimes it was lower. So you want to be aware of what your business is worth. Because when you grow this type of business, you will court buyers whether you do it actively or not.

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If you don’t put a price tag on your business, someone else will.

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Let's find out what this business is worth, we are going to revisit our benchmarking. So let's compare the two, are we getting the value? Are we industry leaders? What is our business worth? And what do we need to tweak in small areas in order to make this the most saleable business? Some of the strategies and tactics you might use in selling your business should you choose to do that you might be on the verge of taking your business public. So you want to surround yourself with the experts that can bring you to an–an initial public offering, or IPO, you might merge with another company or acquire another company, you may sell this on your own. At this point, as we discussed earlier, we talked about a tangible analysis of your business, the assessments, the benchmarking, the attributes, indices that we talked about earlier. This is the time to do a full asset analysis of your business, a total asset analysis of your business to make sure that no stone is uncovered and that you are aware of the value of everything in your inventory. Tangible and intangible because there is somebody right now whether you're doing it or not, is placing a price tag on every aspect of your business and you want to be ready.

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Functional and dysfunctional problems should both be avoided.

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Complacency and cruise control can happen here. It is a blind spot. It is a functional problem, but you need to get back to it right away. If you're having cash flow problems, if you're having net profit problems at this point, that's very dysfunctional. This is almost like a second honeymoon for the business. Strong systems, strong controls, cosmetic enhancements, puts you back in the forefront in your market, sales should increase simply by making that change. If you go back to the team that you built earlier on, we talked about having somebody who's an expert in business evaluations. What is a business worth? Here is where one of your power tools will be doing an evaluation of the business. This is an add on and a logical progression to the benchmarking that you've done.

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Time to assess your leadership team. Here’s what to look for in Stage Six…

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Here is where you want to, especially in the later stage of six in the later trimester of stage six is to focus on your executives, your leadership team, your key employees, making sure they are not only in alignment, that they are building their core competency. This is an area to revisit your milestones planning. Have you achieved what you thought you would achieve to this point? Very key. You're in the homestretch, you have a business that's profitable, cash flow should be high, very functional at this stage, profit should be high, very functional at this stage. It is the systems and controls that are still driving the business. So it is very functional. If there are times when you feel you get away from your vision. You want to get back as quickly as possible, but it is a symptom of this stage.

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Achieving saleability is about cosmetic enhancements, not major overhauls!

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Our focus has returned to sales. We want our sales to be boosted upward. We want to make these books very shiny. We want our financials looking great. We want to build a credit worthy investor friendly business, the kind that's attractive to financial institutions, private investors, anyone with cash, because in the saleability stage, our star is born. This is not the time to overhaul the business. As we said before in our cosmetic enhancements, the ladies will tell you it's lipstick and Rouge and you're on your way. The men will tell you, put on a baseball cap. Check your underarms, little deodorant, you're on your way. Cosmetic enhancements, this is not a time for an overhaul of the business. And when you pursue selling the business, you want to make sure you've left highly trained talent behind. It's your goal to sell the business or not. Part of what will make you valuable is the fact that the business is not reliant on your efforts and energy.

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As a business expands, it can lose its vision. How to avoid that in this episode of #70secondCEO.

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Other blind spots to be aware of and to be careful of letting sales dip at this point, there any sales dip at this point is a dysfunctional problem and a crisis point. Be careful of a loss of direction or a disconnect from your MVP planning, your mission, your vision and your planning. Remember, you're expanding now, your mission statement must be accepted by everyone in the group. So the mission statement that is on the wall in the CEO’s office, every person in the organization must know it by heart, on demand, spontaneously know it, and believe it that's how you'll know that your programs and your enhancements have gone all the way down and trickles down to the entire organization. So what is our outcome? Our outcome of the business at this point is cosmetic enhancements. We're still staying focused on our planning. We have our eye on our sales goals or milestones planning. Now we want to build and upgrade the products, the look and feel of the image. That's part of our focus as well.

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Your business is expanding. Your systems are self-sustaining. What could possibly go wrong??

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Stage six, the saleability stage, A star is born. At this stage, we now have three of the four dimensions running very highly. We've instilled a culture of i cubed, we've created the systems, they're sustainable, we've expanded our business, we have multiple locations, or a franchise or a sequel or an affiliate program we bought on new projects, we must be careful of our blind spot. And our blind spot in stage six is cruise control, or complacency. We think we've won the game and it is over yet. We've put everything in place, now we can just kick back and enjoy it. Not quite. You'll notice on the graph that D is still very low. It is the systems and the controls that are driving the business. sales have increased exponentially. This is a time that many people will party and think that they're done. You still have some work to do.

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