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Introducing our new show "Business BeyonDIY"!
I'll be covering topics relating to the transfer of business value so if you're thinking of buying a business, selling one or have one that you want to prepare for sale in the future... you're in the right place!
Businesses are bought and sold based on the perception of future value.
Business owners are often experts in fields outside of business.
We developed Business BeyonDIY to help you cross that chasm.
Show Topics:
Buying a Business
Selling Your Business
Preparing Your Business for Sale
Practical | Actionable | Sustainable
Business owners and entrepreneurs are go-getters. We start things other people don't (sometimes too many things am I right?) and we push through hard times. That means that entrepreneurship involves a lot of DIY.
Some of the most important transactions we make are buying a business; preparing a business for sale and selling a business. We'll almost always want/need help to make these successful but there is still a lot we'll need to do ourselves.
Business BeyonDIY is a Livestream/podcast where we own our DIY nature but find that sweet spot where doing it yourself doesn't mean going it alone.
In this introductory episode, I'll let you know the format of the show, what to expect, and when I'll be live.
I'm looking forward to getting to know you and your business and sharing practical tips that will make your DIY more like DI-Us!
Stephen Krausse
When it comes to business, people talk a lot about profit. We talk about marketing. We talk about social media followers, we talk about finance, what we don't talk about is the practical and honest expectation that we had when we became an entrepreneur in the first place. We want to build something more than the amount of money we spent on our business or the amount of time and effort we put into our business. We want to build something with leverage. And creating a valuable business is about a lot more than what you pay for it or how much you get paid. In that is what business beyond DIY is all about. Hi, business owners and entrepreneurs, welcome to Business beyond DIY, where we get you from here to what comes next. I'm your host, Stephen Krausse. C, I'm in business by education, trade, and passion. And I want to help you increase the value of your entrepreneurial journey. The business beyond DIY live stream podcast is about one thing, the present and future sale or purchase of a business, your business. So let's get started.
Alright, so why Why listen to the show? Why have business beyond DIY as a show? What is business beyond DIY mean? What's in it for you every week? That's what I'm going to cover today in this episode is what does it mean? Business beyond DIY. And so we'll talk about the premise of the show, and what you're going to get out of it. So we'll get right into that. Why business beyond DIY, why this show, for those of you who know me or have participated in my shows before, I had a podcast called up into the right for a number of years that I produced. And I got to the point where I felt like I needed to address a different topic, a different, not a different audience, but a different topic, or narrow my focus, there's a lot of good value in that podcast, it's still out there, they're 6263 episodes, something like that. And they're on YouTube as well in a playlist. And if you're interested in business, I encourage you to to check out that podcast. But when, as I developed as a content creator, and as a professional, and I started to define what I wanted to do, as part of my contribution to the business community, I realized that the up into the right podcast had was was there was there's a lot of good information, but it's not narrowly focused. And I felt like is sometimes it feels like a sort of my stream of consciousness about business at the time. And while that might be valuable, and there are some really important topics in there, it also leaves an audience with well, what am I going to get this week? And so when I started thinking about doing a new, a change, I thought, well, what am I going to do that? You know, in terms of Do I just change the format of my existing show? Or do I create a new show altogether. And after some soul searching and some thinking about it, I realized that I didn't want to try to create something, or change something that already existed, rather than just start fresh with something new. So I'm starting fresh with business beyond DIY. And what you're going to find is the focus is very narrow. It's about I mean, you can put a lot of words around this, but it's bout the transfer of business value. That's it. And as business owners, that's what it's all about, at both sides of the spectrum. So when we start a business, when we buy a business, we want to understand the value that we are bringing into our lives that we are spending our money on. And when we go to sell our business, we want to ensure that we have created great value for someone to be interested to buy, but we also want to be able to demonstrate that value to a prospective buyer. Both of those things are huge. And then in the middle of that there's how do you prepare a business for sale? Now why the DIY comment in this business owners are notorious di wires. We tried. We want to do everything we can ourselves. And part of that is because we started With maybe less capital than a larger business, or we're just, we want to do it ourselves. Sometimes it's about trust, nobody can do it as well as I can. And, and whether that's real or not, if you are an artist, and you create a specific kind of art, it's very likely that no one is going to do it the way that you do.
And that's very difficult to replicate with a with a staff, which is why artists typically aren't a production line, and why production art looks like production art. But a lot of us create value in different ways, product based businesses, especially once you have learned to create a product, how do you build that into something you can replicate? Well, I'm getting a little bit further down the road there that I wanted to. But my point is that we tend to get wrapped up in doing it ourselves. And part of that is good, when we're starting out, we need to do things ourselves, because we need to save money, we need to understand where things are going, before we start getting help. You can't tell people what to do, if you're not sure how it's going to get done in a way that reflects you as a professional, you as a business owner and you as a person. So we've got to bring that in. So great. We do a lot of DIY, and sometimes we're going to do DIY, sometimes it's the best thing we can do. And, and that, but we have to be able to get the value into our business. And that's where beyond DIY is so important. Because DIY is great when you're starting when you're starting something new. So if you're starting a new business, or you're buying a business, and you're and you've got to get in deep, and you do doing it yourself is critical, it's the only way you can really do it and be a part of it. But as you grow and transition as you begin to prepare your business for sale, and as you begin to look actively for a buyer and and then begin the negotiations with a buyer, you have to be able to demonstrate that the value of your business is not about you. And so now we have to take the you out of doing it yourself, which means we have to find a different way. And by the time we go to to sell our business there has that different way has to be in place. So that's the the broad the broad strokes of what business beyond DIY means. And the like I said, the focus of this show from start to finish is going to be about transferring value. And understanding how value affects our day to day lives. As we own our business, or as we go to transfer ownership. So every week, what we're going to do is we're going to talk about a specific topic, whether it's something related to selling a business, something related to buying a business or something related to preparing your business or sale. And we're going to talk about Street View stuff that you can actually do, we're not going to be talking about, I'm reading a book by I'm not going to, I'm not going to call them out. But if you've read business books, a lot of them are so are they're written for people who want to understand business knowledge, which is great. I want to understand medicines knowledge, but it actually has to be translated to useful. And that's not helpful in the moment for a lot of people. What I'm going to do with this show is talk about specific topics where we're going to say, how is this practical? In the case of a small business, how do we get from here to what comes next using this idea? And so, you know, just to reach back a little bit, if you're a business owner, you really only have two entries and two exits. And I want to touch on this because it matters when we talk about transferring value. One, when we talk about entries, you've got two of them. One you buy a business that's existing, or you start one up, if you're starting one up, if you're in that early startup phase, by all means, listen to the show, watch the show live if you can interact, but understand that What I'm talking about is going to be a little bit later in the game for you, when you're starting to prepare your business for sale, and over the course of episodes, we'll talk about when you need start thinking about that. If you're buying an existing business, you know, we will be talking directly about that process, you know, when what do you look for, when you go to buy a business? How do you go through that process in
a way that is as comfortable as possible, and make sure that you're buying the value that you expect, and I don't talk a lot about getting the most, right, everybody's most is going to be different. What is important to me is that you get the value you're expecting, that's what's critical to me, and this is the same when you're selling, are you getting the value you expect? So two entry types, we'll talk about, certainly, we'll talk about the the aspects of buying a business, when it comes to exit a exiting, we have two choices, just just like that, we close up shop, in which case, we get nothing, or we sell the business, in which case, we get the value that we can demonstrate to a buyer. So it all comes down to how are we positioned in our business to transfer that value to somebody else? Both mentally? How can we transfer that vision? And also, you know, financially in terms of assets and, and equipment. So that's what I hope my notes. So live TV. Alright. Sorry about that. Had my notes collapsed. Anyway. So that's business beyond DIY. That's what the podcast and live stream is going to be about. And I already touched on DIY a little bit. Let me let me kind of clarify some thoughts around that. DIY is important to business owners. I talked about that already critical to business owners. But we get into the habit of doing it too much. And we have to figure out when do we use DIY? And how do we decide not to, you know, when do we decide not to? This is a trap, actually, that we have have are the tools that we have have have put us in a position where DIY become so enticing that we have a hard time getting out of it. Let me explain what I mean by that. So 20 years ago, well, okay, so this was 95. So that's more than 20 years. You know, we were working on a website for a business, and we were doing it ourselves. And if you remember, at that time, the tools were not what we have today. I was using front page and Dreamweaver. And ultimately, we got something functional, uploaded to the web wasn't necessarily pretty, but it worked for a while until, excuse me till we could move on to something else. But now, and let me just clarify a little bit on that. I did it because I wanted to do it. I was interested in the technology. And I was interested in how that process went, you know, what was it like and, and so there's a little bit to that. And we'll talk about how you go into the decision of what you do yourself and what you don't. But that applies to that decision. So the this whole concept of DIY now, though, is that the tools are getting more and more advanced. And while that sounds really good, it can be a trap. Because it can make us believe that we should be doing that. You know, oh, I'm a business owner, I should be using XYZ product because I can because it's been been created so that it is easier to do. You know, we have WordPress and Squarespace and Shopify and Weebly and any number of other web development tools just to continue that particular example. To make web design easy or to make web development easy. I don't want to make my artist friends angry by saying design becomes easy because that Actually, is the point when you're using a tool like that web design is kind of a product of whatever template you're using from their portfolio. And that might be perfectly suitable, it's certainly going to be better than what I did in 1996.
But is it going to be suitable to your brand and your business? And is it going to be the best choice and the best use of your time? That's a different question. And website design is not probably really any easier now than it was 20 or 30 years ago, because design is an art form, not a mechanical act. And so I don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole. But the point is, our tools are getting so good that they kind of they become a tantalizing trick to get us to do things for which we are not well suited. You know, another good example of that is creating is using Canva. So you don't have to hire somebody to do social media. And I'm not saying that Canva is not a good idea. I have Canva account, I'm, you know, and it's, but there's a balance there that you have to choose and figure out and if you were doing it all yourself, what are you not doing because of that. And so we end up getting into this DIY cycle and just go down the list, QuickBooks is exactly the same way. And any online accounting software, and any online CRM, all of those things critical to business. And I would never suggest we don't want to use an accounting system or a digital accounting system online, or any. I wouldn't suggest we don't want to use these tools. But do you, as the business owner, need to be using those tools? And it's that's what becomes the trap? It's so easy that why am I not doing it myself? Well, you're not doing it yourself, because it's not your skill set? Maybe. So, how do we know when not to use DIY, and I will touch on this in every topic that we talk about is what is the DIY criteria for something. And in the case of just in general terms, you know, if if you're going to be spending hours and hours, you know, doing social media using Canva and, and an aggregator and, or, you know, like a HootSuite or Buffer. You know, that's hours and hours that you're not doing what your genuine skill is. Now, maybe you're a marketer by trade, and you bought a product based business, and that's what you should be doing. That's how you make the decision, is you really have to dig in and say, Is this the most effective, most leveraged use of my time? And sometimes we're gonna say, Yep, this is the best thing I can be doing right now. So I should be doing it. Sometimes we're gonna say, well, now if I'm being honest, I need help. I shouldn't be doing this. This is not my forte. Okay. Now, the next step is how do you get that help? And we'll move on, find the real trick, or one of the tricky spots is, what if you really like doing it? And it isn't, maybe the, the best use of your time. And part of what we started business for is to have some control, right? Say, Okay, I want to do this. Well, you're the owner, you get to decide, as long as you understand the impact. And so that's the scope of doing it yourself. That's what doing it yourself. You know, it, we always had to do that. But anyway, the tools of DIY have gotten better and better and better, which is a great thing, especially early on. But being able to transfer those activities to other people. As soon as you're capable and outside and the things that are outside of your, your full scope or full ability or your best ability, whatever you want to call it. As soon as you can get those offloaded to somebody else. Let them use the easy tools, that just means they spend less time doing that. So if it's an outside resource, they can charge you less because they're spending less time or if it's an inside resource, they can do more than one thing. You know, they can do web development or web update. And social media posting, and, you know, edit blogs or whatever. And, and
so that's it, the tools are great. But we do need to be careful about getting trapped by them into thinking that we should be doing everything ourselves. And that doesn't go just with online tools, it goes with that advancement in tools in every industry all the time. You know, if you want to talk about mechanics, you've got the the CNC machine is the same kind of thing, you get it, you can get a CNC machine at pretty economical prices now, where you can do a lot of work with the computer and that machine. And that's great. If it doesn't trap you, 3d printers, same exact thing. You know, they are a great way to move forward. But as a business owner, you need to be careful that you're doing the work that you need to be doing. And that's where we go with business beyond DIY, how do we get from where we are to what comes next using our best skill set. Alright. So in terms of what we're going to be doing, you know, I've already talked about the topic, what I want to talk a little bit about is the format and the fact that what we're going to be doing is, you know, real world stuff, I alluded to that book that I'm reading right now that I literally I can only read it for well read audiobook, I can only listen to it for, you know, a little bit at a time. And then it's just, it's just too heavy. And I have to say, Alright, I'm going to put that down for a little while. But the, we're going to talk about real topics that affect real business owners, at those particular times of business in the selling process in the buying process. And in that process, where you're starting to get your business ready for sale. We're not going to be talking about hypotheticals, in terms of, you know, some kind of high 30,000 foot view, position, there are lots of people that write books about that, I want to get it down to the practical level for you. And that's what we're going to do. And so it's going to be based on the realities of business ownership as a business owner, not as a case study. And I think that's really important, practical solutions, it isn't helpful to know something, if it doesn't help you create value in your business. I mean, I guess it could help on Jeopardy. But for the purposes of this show, we're going to be talking about things that add value to your business, or how do you create value from the knowledge that you're getting?
Unknown Speaker
Action it's going to is one of
Stephen Krausse
the key words here, knowing something, having it be practical, those are great. But if you can't act on it, you haven't gotten anywhere either, right? So we need things to be practical, but we also need them to be actionable things we can move forward on. So if it's not usable, because we don't know enough information, or we can't afford it doesn't have the we there's a cost a cost prohibitive issue. Or if the return on investment isn't sufficient, then we don't want to do it. Right, we shouldn't do it. If the ROI the return on investment isn't sufficient, then you shouldn't be doing that thing for your business. So we're going to be looking at, you know, how do we implement something in a way that is cost effective, that is going to be practical, that is usable? That is going to create the return on investment that we need to move our business forward to? Yeah, I guess the other piece of it when this it sounds kind of like I'm focused a lot on processes there that would be in that preparation for a business sale kind of category. And that's true. But there are also things when you look at the scope of work that comes with buying or selling a business, understanding that process and going through that if you don't have practical action that you can take, you can miss steps. You can come across with less confidence when you're talking to the other party. There's an You can end up not doing the work you need to do to make sure that the business is valuable for you. And so that's one of the things that it's really important to have actions you can take in those in those areas. And finally, once we know something that's practical, and we can take action on it, most of the time, we need to be able to sustain it. And we need to be able to make a change that we can continue moving on into the future. This matters when you're buying a business as well as when you're going to certainly preparing to sell it. And then obviously, once you've sold a business, unless you're moving on to to buying another business, maybe you're retiring or whatever, then, you know, you may have less interest in the sustainability of a change. But when you're buying a business, you're not buying what the business is today, businesses are bought and sold based on the fee on future value, or the perception of future value. So when you're buying a business, you have to understand what is going to happen in the future. And very often, I would say most of the time, in my experience, people buy something with the idea that if they would do this, the business would grow more, not just I'm going to pay the owner, I'm going to continue to do what they do. And that's the future of the company, there's almost always a reason that a company is can be better leveraged. And so that, and that's why we buy them, nobody sells a cash cow. If a company is just printing money, why would you sell that? Right? Unless you see the end game and no one else does. In which case, well, that's part of the due diligence side on the part of your buyer. But if a company is just printing money, they're not going to sell it. If you're buying a company that looks like it's printing money, that's a warning sign more than a benefit. Because there's probably something either the market is going to end soon, if they're willing to sell it, or there is something else to be concerned about. And we would have to talk about that on a case by case basis. But the the whole idea of when you buy a business, you've got to move into what is that going to look like in the future? And you need to have a plan for that. And are those changes sustainable? You know, or how do you make them sustainable, almost any change is sustainable, if you implement it correctly. And so whether that's habit transformation,
or or machinery changes, or whatever other things need to change in a business, to move it forward. Those ideas have to be something you can have, you can start now, but continue into the future, so that you can get those gains. So good business ideas are often coupled with effective psychology. And so that's part of the whole process. Alright, thank you so much for watching today. Or listening if you're listening to the podcast. This is going to be exciting for me, I'm looking forward to sharing information on on the topic of transferring the value of a business, whether you're buying, preparing to sell or selling. Just by busy being a business owner, you are on a journey that most people aren't able or willing to go. They're not they're just not willing to go there. That's important for our economy no matter what the scale of your business is. So thank you. For more information about building business value, connect with me on your favorite social media platform that I've included in the links below or in the description for the video after the live streams if you're watching live, I haven't put those in the description yet. Thanks for being here. Thanks for doing what you do and for the hard work that you put in. I'm looking forward to our journey together. Before I sign off for real i i am going to make a schedule live stream for this so this will happen at a specific time every week. And that will be up shortly so if you're not subscribed to my YouTube channel and you want to watch live or you just want to be notified when a new video comes up, go ahead and hit that subscribe button and hit the bell so you're notified. Entrepreneurs are real do it yourselfers, just remember that doing it yourself, doesn't mean going it alone. Take care and thank you very much
Transcribed by https://otter.ai