Ever wish you could sell your business?

Two important truths you need to know:

Truth #1: If you want to sell because you’re exhausted, it means your relationship with your business is unhealthy.

If your business makes you feel trapped, frustrated, or overwhelmed, it’s a sure sign that it can’t run without you.

All the reasons you want to escape it are the same reasons a potential acquirer won’t want to buy it.

Truth #2: Selling your business takes longer than you think.

It’s kind of like living in a house during major renovations. It’s disruptive. Chaotic. Things go wrong. There are lots of surprises and delays.

If you’re desperate to escape and full of resentment about how much time and energy your business takes, then you’ll have a hard time sustaining your energy through the exit process.

The way you feel when you start the process will affect the way you feel during the process. And that affects how long it takes and how much money you’ll get in the end.

One of the hardest things about selling your business is the effort it takes to continue to grow it while at the same time trying to sell it.

It’s easy to get excited by the prospect of a sale or distracted by all the details and paperwork.

When you’re distracted, your sales may slow because you’re not spending as much time marketing and selling.

Your team starts to disconnect because you feel guilty about your plans to sell so you avoid them.

Quality suffers because you can’t focus. You feel inauthentic when you meet with clients because you’re hiding something.

The solution is to clean up your mind before taking action.

So that you start feeling clear, confident, and focused now. So that you can actually enjoy the process of growing (and possibly selling) your business.

The way to do this is to look for what’s good about your business. Appreciate it and feel connected to it. Don’t try to run away from it.

Just like you can love the house you grew up in and still not want to live there as an adult, you can love your business and still decide to sell it.

But love it first and then other people will too.

You want to feel energized to make the changes to your business that will allow you to scale it (whether or not you decide to sell) and feel great at the same time.

Focus on and amplify what you already love about your business. After all, it’s a part of you. You built it from nothing.

Then take strategic actions to increase the value of your business. Make your business scalable, differentiated, and cashflow positive.

Charge in advance, narrow your niche so that you’re unique and different, turn services into solutions that scale and market them like products, and build a leadership team to run the business without you.

But love your business first. Because the way you feel about it affects everything you do.