This is your life’s work; you can’t let it fall apart.
I call them tipping points:
A kind of a no-man’s-land where things stall. Growth has hit a wall and you’re trying lots of things, but nothing is moving. Most leaders don’t know they’re in a tipping point, they just know it’s getting exhausting and expensive.
At the tipping point, a business has two possible trajectories: it can either make a smooth landing on the side of continued growth, or it can slide backwards – sometimes with severe consequences.
There are various reasons why a company struggles to navigate their tipping point and mature into the middle market, but the biggest one I see is relying on what worked before.
The infrastructure and growth strategies that led you to the edge of becoming middle market are not sufficient to guarantee a successful transition into a middle market company.
Exit & Transition
You don’t want to be in a position where you have to settle for a low offer.
Knowing where to sell and preparing for it will significantly enhance your profits and greatly reduce your stress.
I’ve been there
There are good points and bad points to sell. Unfortunately many owners sell at the wrong point – when the business hits a tipping point. Buyers don’t want to pay top dollar for a company in a tipping point.
When I lead a company making the middle market transition I wish someone had shown me what we were going to face.
We went around the loop several times, experiencing a lot of frustration and losing confidence when I learned what was really going on:
We had not been implementing growth and infrastructure strategies in the right sequence.