Don’t Even Think About Selling Your Amazon Business Without Doing This…
For most business owners, the end goal of building a thriving business is to sell it for a tremendous profit. It’s like investing in a home and then selling it once it has appreciated. Selling a business for top dollar doesn’t come easy, but if you’ve done your part to make the business attractive to a buyer, you can expect a pleasant return on your investment!
Jeff Lieber, the founder of Turnkey Product Management, started as an Amazon seller. He sold puppy and baby products for several years and eventually grew the business to the point where it became attractive to potential buyers and selling made sense. When he went to his accountant for the next steps, he was shocked by the response he got. He was told that his next step was to clean up his books, to the point where anyone could walk in and think that running his business looked doable.
Jeff thought his books were fine, but they were only fine because HE understood them and HE knew where to look for information. Someone else wouldn’t be able to make sense of them, and they certainly wouldn’t want to take them over in the state they were in. Just as you’d declutter a house and landscape the yard before you put it on the market, Jeff set out to give his business some “curb appeal”.
He hired someone to compile all the sales information from his years of selling, created legible spreadsheets, and was able to show a clear upward trajectory in his sales. It took a bit of doing, but once that was finished, he had a much cleaner business to present to buyers. More important, without changing a single system or increasing sales by a single dollar he increased the value of his business.
Our #1 tip for selling your business: Clean up your books. Think of it this way, if it wasn’t yours, would you want to “move into” your business? If not, what things need to be organized, systematized and dialed in to make that transition seem not only doable but sustainable and profitable for the buyer? Once you’ve answered those questions, you’re on the way towards selling your business for the big bucks. Good luck!
Hear the full story of the lessons Jeff learned while selling his Amazon business by listening to Episode 5 of the Playbook for Amazon Podcast.