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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Licensing, franchising, affiliate programs, joint ventures… Here’s what comes after Stage 5.

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

Strategic end of building your business. Now is the time to look into licensing, franchising, expansion, affiliate programs, joint ventures, other types of networking. If you have a product, create a sequel, now's the time. Stage five is the foundation and will lead you into stage six and seven in a way where the business is running itself. You know, you're in stage five, when you can leave your business for two months or more and return back to that business running as good if not better while you were gone. That's when you know you have a stage five business. It's immortal. It can live beyond you and it has developed its own personality.

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Do you have your finger on the pulse of the industry standard? 

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

So now that your systems are working in the business, how do you work on the business? Here are your power tools. Now is the time to revisit all of your benchmarking. How are you compared to the industry standard? How are you compared to your standard of becoming tops in your field, you're now about to expand. So you want to make sure that you're following very closely and have your finger on the pulse of the industry standards because it is what you will need to live up to in order to expand so internally with your employees, now is the time for performance based incentives, non monetary bonuses and recognition. Employee of the month other programs on and on getting your employees involved in charitable causes, sponsoring events, company picnic that also is attached to some worthy cause.

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Think you won’t have blindspots by Stage 5? Think again!

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

Now, what are some blind spots for stage five? And it's a bit of a paradox, because there really should be no blind spots at stage five. So let me discuss a bit of why franchises fail, whether you bought one or you built it to this point, the number one reason why franchises fail is the owners deviate from the system. They don't follow through in the system. They refuse to let go of micromanaging their employees who they have trained and empowered and help design the systems with. These are the areas you need to be very, very careful of because the personality and your disk graph for stage five, you'll notice that D part has come down a bit, you as the owner do not need to be driving everything you can let go. That will free up the systems to create incremental improvement in all areas.

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Want to expand and duplicate your business? #70secondCEO

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

Your outcome here in stage five is strategic expansion. How am I going to build this business? How am I going to expand it? How am I going to grow it? How am I going to duplicate it, or as part of your expansion plan here, you might be considering your exit. So one of the tools will be–that we'll talk about later is an exit strategy and making sure you have one in place for at least you are beginning to formulate that exit strategy. Your focus is going to create a culture of iCube, intelligent, incremental improvements to quality. How do you do that? You're going to do a debrief and feedback of virtually every process on a regular basis. You're going to provide feedback to your co-workers. You're going to coach them, what are three things I saw that you did great? What are three things I think you can do to take your performance and your results to the next level? And then offer support and resources in those areas.

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