Liber8 your Business by Laura Humphreys (early readers txt) 📕

If you don’t know where you are going, how will you know when you get there?

You must have an exit strategy

One day you will no longer want to work in your business. It could happen suddenly, or it could happen after a long time of living and breathing your business. Even if you can’t see a day when you ever want to leave your business, the reality is that if you build a valuable business someone will want to pay a lot of money for it. And you will have choice. Choose to sell or choose to keep your profitable, well-managed business. What a wonderful decision to have to make!

The cleanest exit by far is a future sale, where you walk away with a tidy sum to invest and live happily ever after. The ‘leveraged’ business, where you remain the owner and receive income through share dividends or directors fees, is the alternative. There are business models that lend themselves to this and we’ll explore some later. However, this approach comes with warnings based on a number of disasters I’ve seen and heard about.

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When a good exit plan goes wrong ...

Here’s a quick story about two men who started their businesses at the same time. One was my father; the other was his best friend, Ray. Both got into the photocopier industry in the 1970s (you’ll hear more stories about my father and his business throughout this book). Both were successful and within 10 years had built thriving profitable businesses. My father decided to sell his company and walked away with a tidy sum. Ray decided to appoint a managing director to run his business for him so he could enjoy the profits from a distance and with minimal involvement. Fast forward five years. My father had invested his money wisely and was enjoying a life of passive income. He did need to spend time on his investment portfolio, but this was minimal and he was mostly enjoying his retirement. Ray discovered his managing director had been embezzling the company, leaving it insolvent. He not only lost the business but had to repay a mountain of debt. He had nothing to show for his 10 years of business success, and retirement was suddenly out of reach.

It takes time to create a quality business that has value. You don’t want to be in a position where you need to sell your business without having planned for it.

Having a planned exit is a critical component of this book. Liber8 Your Business will show you how and provide the steps to get you there as soon as possible.

View your business as a product

A successful angel investor friend explained to me the concept of exit strategy like this: To achieve a successful exit, it helps to view your business as a product. A good business person empathises with their customer and understands their reasons for buying your product. You know what need your product fulfils in the market and who will want to buy it. You use your expertise and experience to create the best possible product to meet this need. You build a relationship with potential customers with a view to making sales.

Now, step back and look at your business as a product. Why would someone want to buy your business in the future? Which companies could take your business and create more value with it? What needs do they have that your business could fulfil? How could you build your business to make it easy for them to acquire and integrate it with theirs? This is your market and selling proposition. And just as it takes time to build a customer base for your product, it takes time to build a relationship with your potential buyer. So start now.

Subscribe to the concept of leverage

At the end of each year you should be working less in your business than you were at the end of the year before. This objective is something that’s missing in typical business plans and yet your goal towards freedom should always focus on leverage, leverage, leverage.

Here’s a definition of ‘leverage’ I found online at businessdictionary.com:

‘Leverage is the ability to influence a system, or an environment, in a way that multiplies the outcome of one's efforts without a corresponding increase in the consumption of resources. In other words, leverage is the advantageous condition of having a relatively small amount of cost yield a relatively high level of returns.’

If you add the words ‘or time’ after the words ‘small amount of cost’ in the above definition then I think we can really start to appreciate what leverage means in a business sense. It’s about you achieving more by doing less – multiplying the outcome of your efforts and decreasing the time you spend to get this outcome. A typical owner-operator business, such as a plumber or an interior designer, spends all of their time IN the business doing the work to make the money. This is the opposite of leverage. This is using all your resources to achieve the same return, day in and day out. As I said, you are never going to get rich exchanging time for money.

How do you stop the business being dependent on you? If your own skills and talents form the basis of the income for your business, please start to think how you can change this.

How to get the most of this book

In this book I’m taking you on a journey. We’ll start by looking at your mindset to make sure you are ready to be wealthy and free. You will learn how to be a visionary and I will help you choose which exit strategy could be right for your business. You’ll learn the art of planning backwards with milestones all the way from your vision to your business today. You will conduct an audit on your business and clarify the areas you need to work on today to move towards your long-term vision. You will learn the magic of leverage and how to apply it to your business. And you will learn the key disciplines you need to ensure you build your business to its maximum.

Liber8ing Exercises

I’ve included exercises with each chapter so that you can build your vision, your plan, and your action steps as you go. Every time you see this infinity symbol, there is an exercise for you to do. If you complete the exercises, by the end of the book you will have written your exit strategy, your long term vision and plan, and have your action steps confirmed for the next 12 months.

My suggestion would be to read the book through first, to understand the concepts and get a sense of the overall journey you are about to go on. Then go back and do each of the exercises in turn. Make sure you have a pad of large size plain paper, some Post-its, a calculator and any existing business planning work on hand.

Useful tools

Throughout the book I’ll refer to useful tools to help you with various exercises. These can be downloaded for free from the Liber8 Your Business website at www.liber8yourbusiness.com.

More resources

The Liber8 Your Business Online programme contains further resources, including templates, video seminars, and video interviews with successful entrepreneurs. Instructions on joining the programme can be found at the back of the book.

You will get out what you put in

Allow yourself between two to four hours to work on the main exercises. Make a commitment to yourself to work ON your business, book a couple of regular time slots in each week. Try to complete all exercises within a four-week period. Your financial freedom is the prize here, committing quality time to it now will significantly increase your chances of making it happen. I am asking you to do some work here and I make no apologies for this. Success rarely comes without effort.

‘You’ve got to say, I think that if I keep working at this and want it badly enough I can have it. It’s called perseverance.’ – Lee Iacocca

Or as I saw on a billboard recently, ‘I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. I am saying it will be worth it.’ Here’s what an early reader of Liber8 Your Business had to say about the book and the process:

‘This book is absolutely essential reading for any person serious about creating a successful business. Liber8 Your Business confronts you, challenges you and forces you to ask the necessary questions required to create the mindset and structure for a well leveraged business. I believe every business owner needs to go through this process and then build on what they have already created, or change tack completely. My journey is in the early stages, but I feel this book has helped me immensely already. Thank you.’

The choice is always yours. Make a decision to be financially free and let this book help you get there. Let’s get going …

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LAURA HUMPHREYS is a successful businesswoman, mentor and inspirational speaker. Her book Liber8 your Business comes directly from her own business journey. Laura went from a job as a secretary in a London advertising agency to owning her own agency and selling it to the multi-national, Ogilvy Group, just nine years later. She started this business with nothing – no clients, no staff, just a windowless office with no natural light and no running water. When she sold it, it was billing in excess of $15 million and had been named Agency of the Year. The selling of her first business brought Laura financial independence, which meant she was in a position where she could choose how she spent her time.

Laura then co-founded Pet Angels, a highly systemised award winning pet care business, with a fully automated online search and booking facility that minimised admin requirements to the point where the owners only had to work 10 hours a week. This business sold to a competitor after just six years.

Laura has become passionate about the concept of ‘leverage’ in business – doing more with less to the point where businesses do not rely on their owner in order to generate income. She gives regular talks to business groups and mentors business owners about creating freedom from business. Liber8 your Business is Laura’s entrepreneurial response to the need for a practical guide to planning and building a business that will set you financially free.

Learn more at www.liber8yourbusiness.com

Publication Date: 02-21-2014

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