BUILT TO SELL

"you may want to sleep better at night knowing that you could sell"

John Warrillow, writes this lifechanging story about Alex, a business owner who runs a boutique marketing agency. The marketing agency runs a business that takes care of everyone and everything from running adverts to creating logos and other solutions the clients could need. The book opens with the agency struggling for money despite curating a custom solution for all clients. Alex speaks to his business mentor Ted about what he should do with his business.

Ted explains that the challenge is that a lot of his current business structure actually is dependent on Alex and where he isn’t available, the business suffers. Ted also describes the lack of a positive cashflow as a challenge for service-based businesses. This makes the business unsellable.  Ted tells him to build a SELLABLE BUSINESS. Ted gives him an advice on how he can transition his service-based business to a product-based business thus allowing him the chance to sell his company. And the way to do that is to streamline his services into a single product offering and sell that product only. This will also mean to stop offering custom solutions to all clients but to sell just the one product.

Alex decided to streamline to selling logos only as his only product offering. The business success is in the process of selling logos only. He built and taught his staff a 5-point process system that allows the staff sell and develop a logo without involving him in the process. This totally revolutionizes his business. Because of the new business structure, his involvement in the business operation drastically reduces and thus allowing him to grow the business by looking for ways to better improve the system and also make the business sellable.

In the end, he is able to sell his business but our lesson from it isn’t just to sell businesses but to build business that can scale and be sold.

How does this affect you as a fashion business owner?

From time immemorial, you have been taught that people give clothes to their tailors but think about this: there are thousands of high end and mid-range brands that even though they have an identifiable CEO, clients and customers do not need to interact with the CEO to have the best quality delivered.

What do they do differently? They build to sell.

As we step into 2025, evaluate your business to identify redundancies and your best-selling service/product. Create a process that turns your best-selling service into a product that requires very little of your input before the product is delivered excellently. Hire people who can sell that service as a product. Empower your team to deliver the product with very little of your input. Write down how much you want to sell your business and how you want to arrive at that figure (you’ll need an accountant for that). Be discipled with the process.

You will need to understand that it will be tough at first but it is going to be worth it.

I will be hiring a full-time process-driven office manager to work as a customer success agent to ease the flow of work management. This will reduce the amount of in-person work I do and allow me focus on figuring out how to sell House of FAAW. What step will you be taking to implement the lesson from this book?