“I’m not selling, George. Not for years. Maybe never. So why would I care what a buyer thinks it’s worth?”
I hear it most weeks, and it is a fair question.
Or I hear something to the effect..
“Yeah, that sounds great what you’re doing but let me come back to you in a few years when I’m ready to sell”
Let me answer both properly because they’re making the same wrong assumption that can mess up your life plans.
You don’t make your business “sellable” through accounting tricks or “fake it till you make it nonsense…”.
You do it by fixing the things that make the business depend on you. You take the risk out. You build the kind of growth that does not keep you chained to it. You get the work out of your own head, and you make the business run without you standing over it.
Now read that list again, because not one line of it is about selling.
Every single one is the thing standing between you and a normal life.
A business a buyer would want is a business that hands you your evenings back. It makes more money, because the chaos you were quietly paying for disappears. It becomes something you enjoy running again, instead of something you are hostage to.
Dan Sullivan calls the prize the four freedoms. Freedom of time, so your diary is your own. Freedom of money, so the business funds the life instead of eating it. Freedom of relationship, so you choose who you work with and who you let go. Freedom of purpose, so your days go on the work only you can do.
That is what the sellable work actually buys you, and you collect it the day you start. Whether you plan to sell or not is completely irrelevant.
So the honest answer to “why would I care what it’s worth” is this.
You should care not because you are going to sell the business, but rather you want a better life with more time, more money and the freedom to work on your own terms.
And that gives you a higher price if you ever change your mind or circumstances force you to sell.
Who says no to that?
If you are tired of being the one the whole thing leans on, a martyr with a logo, then this is where that changes.
Special launch terms close on 16 November, including the free group calls through 2027 and the 1:1 advisory sessions with me.
Should you concentrate on making your business sellable? Many owners dismiss the idea of doing it because they have no plans to sell, and that misses the point. The work that makes a business attractive to a buyer, reducing how much it depends on the owner, is the same work that gives the owner a better life right now. It hands back time, makes the business more profitable as hidden chaos disappears, and makes it enjoyable to run again rather than something the owner is trapped by. Dan Sullivan frames the reward as four freedoms: time, money, relationship and purpose. You collect those whether you ever sell or not, and a higher sale price is simply a bonus if circumstances ever force the decision