Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

What’s your greatest strength as a CEO?

Sales?

Marketing?

Operations?

Whatever you do well, know that it might become your Achilles’ heel. As owners, we tend to invest in areas where we know we’re weak. We know we have limited resources, so we spend what we have on backstopping the places where we’re most vulnerable.

This tendency leads many founders to under-invest in areas where they have natural strength. Two of the most common functions are sales and marketing. Most owners are decent salespeople, so they figure they can compensate for a weakness in generating revenue through force of personality and sheer will.

But determination only goes so far, and you may reach a plateau where your greatest strength becomes what’s holding you back.

How Gold Medal Service Got Stuck at $700,000

Mike Agugliaro is an electrician by training and a natural salesman in practice. He’s a gifted speaker, and his warm personality makes him a magnet for customers. When he started Gold Medal Service with his partner Rob Zadotti, they didn’t invest much in sales and marketing. When Agugliaro was interviewed on the Built to Sell Ratio podcast, he admitted the extent of their marketing in their first decade of operations was pinning a business card on the corkboard of the local coffee shop.

Over 12 years, the business grew slowly to around $700,000 in revenue, which was when Zadotti announced he was leaving. The news made Agugliaro re-evaluate what they had been doing. He realized they had been massively under-investing in sales and marketing.

Agugliaro convinced his partner to stay, and together they started investing heavily in sales and marketing. At the time, the yellow pages were still the primary way homeowners found service providers, so they invested in a double-page spread. They tried radio, fliers, and just about any marketing technique they could measure.

Then the partners started to think of their trucks as giant rolling billboards. Agugliaro’s wife did some research and discovered that humans are hardwired to notice the color yellow. Agugliaro and his wife reasoned that humans must have evolved to avoid bees, so they added black lettering. Gold Medal’s 65 trucks were bright yellow and black and became a mainstay on the streets of New Jersey.

The investments in marketing paid off, and Gold Medal went from $700,000 in revenue in 2004 to a whopping $32 million in sales by 2017. Months later, Sun Capital acquired Gold Medal for a significant premium over the 5 x EBITDA multiple typical of the home services industry.

The takeaway? Your greatest strength can help you start a business. Still, at some point, you may be tempted to underinvest in your strengths, which is when they switch from your most significant assets to a hidden liability. As your business grows, you may need to invest in areas you never considered necessary in the past.

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight-part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

If your goal is to build a more valuable company, stop selling your time.

Billing by the hour or day means customers are renting your time rather than buying a result, which means that your business model lacks leverage. To grow, you need to either work harder or hire more people. Since it can take months to ramp up new employees, fast growth is just about impossible.

One of the eight factors that acquirers look for in the businesses they invest in is your company’s Growth Potential. Simply put, they want to know how fast they could grow your business, and nothing diminishes your Growth Potential more than selling your time.

Billing by the hour can also drag down your customer’s satisfaction with your business — because customers dislike the feeling of being nickel and dimed. They know you’re incentivized to lengthen the time a project takes, while they want a solution in the shortest time. This misalignment leads to unhappy customers, which can destroy the value of your business.

Peddling time also invites competition. When you sell your time, you allow customers to compare you with others offering the same service. This can lead to downward pricing pressure and lower margins as you become commoditized.

How Likeable Media Stopped Selling Time

Carrie and Dave Kerpen started Likeable Media, a social media agency, in 2006. Facebook was emerging as a dominant platform, and marketers were trying to figure out how to monetize users of their platform.

The Kerpens started selling their time but quickly realized the limitations of an hourly billing model. They realized that customers didn’t want to buy their time. Instead, Likeable customers wanted to buy social content. Marketers wanted a video they could post to their Facebook feed, or a blog post they could publish on their site.

The Kerpens decided to switch from an hourly billing model to the Content Credit System. They assigned each piece of content several credits. For example, a tweet might be one credit, a written blog post might be ten, and a video might cost twenty credits. Customers signed up for an annual allotment of credits they could roll over month to month.

The Content Credit System transformed Likeable Media for the better. To begin with, customers were no longer buying time. Instead, they were happy to pay for tangible output rather than trying to scrutinize an hourly bill. The credits also made it easier for Likeable’s Account Managers to upsell customers. They no longer needed to justify why a particular project would take more time. Instead, they suggested that customers buy more credits if they needed more content.

The Kerpens’ innovative billing approach also created recurring revenue because The Content Credit System relied on annual contracts renewed each year.

The Content Credit System also transformed Likeable’s cash flow because customers paid for their credits upfront.

Most importantly, the Content Credit System enabled the Kerpens to stop selling their time and build a team. By 2020, Likeable was up to more than 50 full-time employees when they caught the attention of 10Pearls, a digital strategy company which acquired Likeable Media for 8.5 times EBITDA, a healthy premium over a typical marketing agency.

The bottom line? If your goal is to grow a more valuable company, stop selling your time and start selling your customers’ results.

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight-part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

Before Jeff Bezos & Co. blew up traditional distribution channels, there was some value in being the local guy or gal. Being the local product retailer was a good business and being a regional distributor of a popular line could make you a mint.

Those days are almost over.

In a world where anything is available at the click of a mouse, the fact that you’re local means very little. To build a valuable company, you need to go beyond your physical location as a point of differentiation and cultivate a new value proposition. We refer to this process as improving your “Monopoly Control.” The name is inspired by Warren Buffett, who likes to invest in companies with a wide “competitive moat” — essentially a defendable point of differentiation.

While being a local provider may have gotten you into business, it’s not going to be enough to get you out for a decent multiple. To build a valuable company someone may want to buy one day, you need a fresh sales angle.

Take a look at the journey of Mehul Sheth, who went from a middleman to the owner of an eight-figure business. Sheth started VMS Aircraft in 1995 as a distributor of airline parts. He offered a “one-stop shop” for airlines and their maintenance crews to find parts and accessories.

VMS was the local distributor and survived on gross margins of 22–23%. It was a subsistence living, and Sheth was determined to build a more valuable company. He decided to evolve his value proposition from just being the local warehouse for distributing other people’s stuff to a sophisticated provider of advanced materials. Sheth chose to focus on the materials that airlines need to be stored and handled meticulously. If the safety of your metal tube flying 300 people 40,000 feet in the air is determined by the quality of a seam of metal, you want that steel to be handled carefully. You also want the sealant that joins the sheet of metal kept at a temperature that maximizes its adhesiveness. You may also want your rivets stored with the same care a surgeon uses to put away her scalpel after performing life-saving surgery.

Sheth invested in a clean room that minimized dust at his facility. He bought dry ice containers so certain materials could be stored in a cold environment, maximizing their effectiveness. He also repackaged materials into smaller containers so that an airline that only needed a small amount of a particular material didn’t need to buy an entire tub.

Sheth’s evolution from simple reseller to value-added provider fueled his gross margins to 60–70%. Along the way, Sheth attracted a French company that wanted to enter the U.S. market. Rather than set up shop to compete with Sheth, they realized VMS had created a unique offering with a layer of value-added services that would be difficult to imitate. They decided to acquire VMS for 7.4 times EBITDA.

If you find yourself clinging to the “one-stop shop” sales message, consider evolving to something that truly differentiates you in a world where Amazon (and its various e-tailing competitors) will ship you just about anything, anywhere, overnight.

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight-part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

As a business owner, you’re likely proud of the results you’ve achieved in the past, but when it comes to the value of your business, your future is critical. That’s why your growth potential is one of eight factors that drive the value of your business.

One metric that acquirers may use to evaluate your growth potential is your revenue per employee.
Alphabet (Google’s parent company) generates around $1.3 million in revenue per employee. Compare that to the advertising agency WPP Group, whose average revenue per employee is around $100,000. For every dollar of revenue, WPP needs more than ten times the employees than Alphabet does.

It takes time to recruit, train, and motivate people, which is why WPP has grown more slowly and suffers much lower valuations when compared to a less people-heavy company.

Measuring your revenue per employee is just one of many ways an investor may evaluate how quickly they are likely to grow your company.

Looking Skyward
For an example of some of the other ways acquirers assess your growth potential, take a look at Verizon’s recent acquisition of Skyward. Jonathan Evans started Skyward in 2012 when he spotted companies like Amazon and Walmart using drones for package delivery. Evans was working as an air ambulance helicopter pilot and realized widespread use of drones would eventually create air safety issues.

Evans saw an opportunity where others hadn’t and launched Skyward to develop software that could safely route drone traffic. While he wasn’t a programmer, his extensive aviation experience enabled him to understand how the current airspace management guidelines could be turned into applications that created “digital train tracks” for drones.
Early adopters like utility, construction, and media companies used Skyward’s software to manage their drone fleets. Investors also came calling. Within a few years, Skyward had raised approximately $8 million.

One of those investors was Verizon. Drones would require fast and reliable Internet connectivity to operate safely, and the telecom giant wanted a piece of the future. Airbus came calling too, and when Verizon heard of the aerospace corporation’s interest, they leaped into action and offered to buy the company. For Evans, marrying his nascent technology to the country’s largest telecommunications giant was an ideal match.

Within days, Evans had sold Skyward to Verizon for top dollar. Investors enjoyed returns of between three and five times their original investment.

Given the growth of the industrial drone market, Verizon knew Skyward had the potential to expand quickly as significant companies started to adopt drones. Verizon also understood that as Skyward grew, so too would the customer’s need for Verizon’s data because drones rely on a data connection to communicate with the ground.
No matter what business you’re in, the critical takeaway is to remember that the value of your business is determined less by what you have done in the past and more by what you will likely do in the future.

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight-part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

A football defensive coordinator needs to protect against an “end run,” a tactical play where your opponent sends the running back wide around the offensive line to try to evade the oncoming tackle.

Just like in football, you have to defend against an end run coming from a supplier that chooses to go around you to get to your customers. The more of your supply you get from a single provider, the more vulnerable you are to that supplier deciding they don’t need you and instead deciding to go straight to your customers.

TheAmazeApp

Let’s take TheAmazeApp as a case in point. Sebastian Johnston co-founded TheAmazeApp in 2014. The idea was simple. Social media influencers could upload a picture of what they were wearing (i.e., a “look”) and tag the items on TheAmazeApp’s database of e-commerce wholesalers. Then, when one of the influencer’s social media followers liked their look and wanted to purchase one or more of the items the influencer was wearing, TheAmazeApp would receive a commission, 20% of which was shared with the influencer.

TheAmazeApp’s founding team raised $800,000 through the San Francisco-based accelerator 500 Startups. By leveraging their influencers to drive traffic, TheAmazeApp quickly grew to 4 million active users per month.

The app was a huge success on the outside, but there was a flaw in their model that held back their valuation.

For the model to work, influencers needed to be able to tag whatever they were wearing, so TheAmazeApp needed to get a comprehensive catalog of hundreds of thousands of the latest fashion items. That meant that TheAmazeApp relied on the data feed of five e-commerce wholesalers who uploaded their data to TheAmazeApp.

TheAmazeApp was increasingly becoming dependent on Zalando, one of their five data suppliers. Zalando is one of Europe’s largest fashion wholesalers and controlled around 70% of TheAmazeApp’s inventory.

The more TheAmazeApp relied on Zalando’s data, the less leverage they had when it came time to sell. Johnston approached all five of his data providers to buy his business, and two expressed interest in buying TheAmazeApp. This buoyed Johnston’s spirits because he knew multiple bidders would give him some leverage with acquirers.

As the process dragged on, one of the two acquirers dropped out, deciding to set up a competitive app—doing an end run—and leaving only Zalando left. Given Zalando knew they controlled 70% of TheAmazeApp’s inventory and that a comprehensive selection was key to their business model, Zalando knew they were in the driver’s seat.

Johnston also knew that if he pushed Zalando too hard, he risked Zalando also doing an end run around TheAmazeApp and setting up their own competing service.

In the end, Zalando acquired TheAmazeApp for between two to three times revenue, which was a relatively modest multiple given the traffic the app was generating just eight months after being funded by an accelerator.

The lesson? The more of your supply that comes from one provider, the more susceptible you become to your provider doing an end run around you. This liability drags down the value of your business and undermines your negotiating leverage when it’s your time to sell. Do what you can to diversify your suppliers to maximize the value of your business.

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight-part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

You’ve likely heard the adage that it is far easier to cross-sell an existing customer a new product than it is to find a new customer.

And if your goal is to grow at all costs, then cross-selling makes sense.

However, all of that sales growth may not do much for the value of your company. If you cross-sell your existing customers too much stuff, it could make your business far less valuable.

When you cross-sell a customer so many things that they begin to account for more than 15–30% of your revenue, expect your value to drop. If a single customer represents more than 30% of your sales, expect an even deeper discount.

Customer concentration is one factor that makes up your score on The Switzerland Structure — one of eight drivers the folks over at The Value Builder System™ have discovered drives your business’s value in an acquirer’s eyes.

To summarize in simplistic terms, the least valuable companies focus on selling lots of stuff to a few people. The most valuable businesses do precisely the opposite: by selling less stuff to more people.

How 3D4Medical Made the Switch

As an example, let’s look at the medical technology firm 3D4Medical. Founded in 2004 by John Moore, the company built 3-D models of the human body, photographed them, and sold or licensed their images to textbook publishers.

By 2010, 3D4Medical was selling images to a handful of large publishers around the world. Then the recession hit, severely impacting the entire publishing business.

To make things worse, new generations of students increasingly wanted to learn online, rather than through textbooks. The advent of inexpensive digital photography, and the resulting increase in competition for the same customers, also didn’t help Moore.
Moore had built a successful company on a handful of customers, but when that segment began to dry up, so did his business. Despite working harder than ever, Moore’s revenue plateaued for four straight years. Instead of punching through to the next level, Moore had his hands full just keeping his company going.

But while Moore had relied on too few customers, he still had something no one else had: thousands of 3-D models of the human body.

Then Moore had an idea.

He decided to re-purpose his 3-D images into a mobile app that medical students could use on their phones. Moore expanded the idea to include professors and medical professionals, who could use his 3-D images on an individual basis to learn, teach, and share with patients and students.

By 2019, 3D4Medical had become the biggest producer of medical apps on every app store. The company boasted over 300 of the top universities in the world as clients. Their app served 1.2 million paying customers and had 25 million downloads.

Thanks to having a diverse set of customers, Moore sold 3D4Medical in 2019 for $50.6 million.

The takeaway? Customer concentration is seen as a significant risk when a potential buyer determines the value of your business. That’s why the most valuable companies are the ones that sell less stuff to more people.

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight-part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

Repeat business drives the value of your company, and you can categorize these sales into one of two buckets:

1. Reoccurring revenue comes from customers who purchase from you sporadically. They’re satisfied with what you offer, and they buy regularly yet not according to a specific timeline.
2. Recurring revenue is predictable, and you get it from customers who buy on a cadence. Usually, in the form of subscription or contract revenue, the main difference is your recurring revenue comes in on a regular rhythm.

Recurring revenue is more valuable than reoccurring sales because of its predictability. Therefore, it’s worth considering how to turn repeat customers into subscribers.

HP Instant Ink

For an example of an organization that turned reoccurring sales into recurring revenue, let’s look at the “HP Instant Ink” program. HP had been in the business of selling printers for decades before launching their toner replacement subscription.

HP would sell you a printer in the old days and hope you would come back and buy your toner cartridges from HP. As cheaper replacement options became available, HP started to lose reoccurring revenue from people who owned HP printers but chose a more affordable alternative to refill their cartridges.

In response, they launched the HP Instant Ink program to solve this problem by offering a toner subscription. HP sends subscribers new toner for their printer each month. You can sign up for a plan based on how many pages you print. If you exceed your page allotment one month, you can top up your account. If you fall short, HP offers to carry over your unused pages. Pricing plans start at $0.99 per month.

How does HP ensure you never run out of toner? They have embedded a reader in their printer’s hardware that sends a message to HP fulfillment when your cartridge dips below a predetermined threshold. Hence, you never run out.

It’s a brilliant little program and gives HP some recurring revenue while driving loyalty to HP printers.

Inspired by the HP Instant Ink program, here are three secrets for turning repeat customers into subscribers:

1. Offer plans based on volume: At HP, their $0.99/month plan allows you to print just 15 pages per month. At the top end, their $24.99 plan gives you 700 pages, and they have a variety of options in between. This range of options gives customers the ability to pick a plan that will work for them most of the time.
2. Allow carryover: Customers who buy from you on a reoccurring basis will appreciate your various plans. However, they may still hesitate to subscribe if they anticipate their volume will fluctuate. That’s why HP allows you to seamlessly buy overage if your printing volume is higher than expected. Subscribers can also carry over unused pages if they don’t need their entire allotment.
3. Never let them run out: One of the reasons consumers prefer buying on a subscription over a one-time transaction is that they never want to run out of what you sell. That’s why HP’s integrated toner gauge reads when your cartridge dips below a threshold. Find a way to measure your customers’ supply of what you sell in real-time to ensure subscribers never run out.

Repeat customers are the lifeblood of any business. If you want to jack up your company’s value, consider ripping a page from HP’s playbook, and turn your reoccurring customers into subscribers.

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight-part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

Many people mix up re-occurring and recurring revenue, but one is much more valuable than the other.

Re-occurring Revenue

Re-occurring revenue comes from customers that have a re-occurring need for whatever you sell and buy from you on an unpredictable yet regular basis.

Imagine a health food store. Customers come in to replenish their supply of vitamins when they run out. The owner is never quite sure when a customer will be back, but she’s pretty sure they will return when they run low on a critical supplement.

Recurring Revenue

Recurring revenue comes from sales to customers that buy from you on a predictable, automatic cadence, for example, a subscription or service contract.

Let’s take the same health food store owner. She recognizes her customer comes in every month or so to buy Vitamin C. She decides to offer a subscription for Vitamin C capsules, where she ships a new bottle to her subscribers each month automatically. The customer doesn’t need to make a dedicated trip to her store, and the owner automatically gets repeat sales.

Compared to one-off transaction revenue, both re-occurring and recurring revenue contribute positively to your company’s value, but one is much more valuable than the other.

For example, Mike Malatesta created Advanced Waste Services (AWS), which helped businesses dispose of their industrial waste. Energy giant Covanta (NYSE: CVA) saw acquiring AWS as the perfect way to enter the industrial waste industry and sent Malatesta a Letter of Intent to acquire AWS for $54.5 million.

Covanta liked that AWS had repeat business from loyal customers that they assumed were on recurring contracts. However, when Covanta started their diligence before closing their acquisition of AWS, they realized some of AWS’s revenue was re-occurring, not recurring, and used that as justification to lower their offer by $4 million.

To convert re-occurring revenue into recurring revenue:
1. Start by segmenting your customers that buy on a re-occurring basis.
2. Look for a segment whose purchase cadence is relatively predictable.
3. Design an offer for your regular, re-occurring customers that makes it more convenient for them to buy on a subscription or service contract rather than on a transactional business model.
4. Aim to give re-occurring customers three compelling reasons to subscribe.

For example, in the case of the vitamin store owner, she could make the case that subscribing to a regular shipment of vitamins is 1) more convenient for the customer because there is no need to drive to the store, 2) more reliable because subscribers would be given priority on available stock, and 3) safer because vitamin subscribers would be given a newsletter describing new clinical trial results of emerging vitamin therapies.

Re-occurring and recurring revenue may sound similar, but when it comes to your company’s value, recurring revenue is far better. Consider converting your re-occurring customers into subscribers, and you’ll build a more predictable—and valuable—business.

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight-part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.