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The Founder's Guide To Selling Your Business 🔨
Stephen Moore
October 10, 2023
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Welcome to another edition of EH Weekly, the newsletter from the team behind Medium’s biggest entrepreneur-focused publication.
You can look forward to insightful lessons, practical takeaways and the hottest news stories delivered to your inbox every week.
In this week’s edition, we discuss:
What it’s like to build and sell an agency
How to sell your one-person business
Lessons from building and selling an agency
Jodie Cook, the founder of coachvox.ai, built a social media agency that had everything: a startup phase, a lifestyle phase, a massive shock and a final growth phase before she sold it.
Reflecting on her ten-year journey, Jodie shares the main lessons learned and what she would do differently next time:
1. You can only play one game well — Jodie flitted between the artist game, performance game, lifestyle game and build-to-sell game throughout the decade—bad move. Picking one and sticking to it is a better strategy for your energy, team and state of mind.
2. Niche down for faster growth — Social media was the niche when Jodie started the agency. Soon after, however, specializing would have secured faster growth. It would have led to her agency becoming known for a specific industry or type of work.
3. Take recruitment seriously — During the middle years, Jodie didn’t put the right person in charge of recruitment. She took her eye off the ball with vetting and scrutinizing who joined the team, and it was by far her biggest mistake.
4. Don’t make exceptions — Every time the business ran smoothly and clients were happy, it was because the agency took them through the process that we knew was effective. Whenever something wasn't going right, it was because they’d made concessions or agreed to an exception. It’s difficult to say no, but it always worked out better.
5. Build your personal brand — It’s a myth that building a personal brand means your business is reliant on you. Jodie found that it made the business less reliant on her. How so? Not only did it win them more work, but clients and team members didn’t expect her to be around. It meant her incredibly capable team members were free to show what they could do.
👉️ Read more on Jodie’s journey here: How to Create a Business That Runs Without You
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A realistic journey to selling a one-person business
“Build the plane as you fly it. A business is built through constant iteration, not by grand design.”
After only 456 days, Michael Lim's small one-person consulting business has just been acquired. If you're hoping to replicate the same success, he shared how he did it with EH. There are some great lessons within, including:
Just start imperfectly — Being a wantrepreneur will get you nowhere. Truthfully, it almost doesn't matter how you start, but the most important thing is that you start.
Promise yourself you'll show up — 80% of business success comes down to your beliefs, and beliefs are reinforced through action. All you need to do is show up every day and move your business forward by 1%. The compound effect will do the rest.
Follow what you're obsessed with — Embrace what makes you weird and lean into all the things that light you up. I don't care if it's model trains or Lego. If you can talk and read about it all day, find a scalable business model.
Build long-term relationships — If you don't see yourself working with someone for 5+ years, don't bother working with them for a day. Relationships are everything in business.
👉️ Dive deeper here: How I Sold My First One-Person Business at 28 Years Old