5 Tips to Phase Yourself Out of Your Business

At the end of the day, you probably don’t want to work on your business for the rest of your life. Maybe you have other projects you want to work on or maybe you just want to retire — either way, at some point you’ll want to get out of the day-to-day grind of running a small business. Whether you want to sell or you’d prefer to bring in a manager, you’ll need to make sure that you have phased yourself out of your business and you don’t actually need to be present.

1. Delegate everything: Even if it’s just on a trial basis, you need to make sure that someone else in your business can handle every detail that comes along. If you need to be at your desk for even one thing everyday, you will have a harder time selling your business or leaving it. A trial run can help you identify potential problems early on: maybe you need to provide a matrix for making certain decisions or a checklist to ensure that a certain process is followed closely.
2. Separate your business’ brand from yourself: If your name is on the door, but you aren’t in the office, customers may just walk away. It’s easy for a small business owner to tie her company’s brand to her personal image — especially if you are running a service-based, it’s easy to point out that one of your selling points is that you (personally) are good at whatever you do. But that sort of close tie means that it’s much harder for the business to keep going if you are no longer in it.
3. Look for other service providers: Assuming you run a business that requires you to perform a specific service for clients in order to get paid, you absolutely have to find someone else who can provide that same service. Depending on the service and the credentials necessary, that may not mean just hiring someone — it may require you to bring someone on it what amounts to a junior partner position.
4. Plan for a manager: In the early days of a small business, the owner is likely the manager (as well as the receptionist and janitor). But one of the keys to being able to phase yourself out of your business is having someone else who can make decisions without any guidance from you. By creating a managerial position, you’ll be training an employee to take over those decisions. A full-time manager can require a big jump in payroll, but if your goal is to be able to let your current business run itself while you go on to something else, it’s absolutely necessary.
5. Create clear priorities: There may be certain tasks you do in a very specific way. You may be reluctant to hand those tasks over to someone else because no one else will handle them in exactly the same way you do. But you need to check just how important it is to get things done in such a matter. If it’s a certain style of filling out forms, maybe it isn’t quite that important — the way someone else handles it will be adequate. If it is something crucial, though, perhaps offering some specific training will get you the results you want without your needing to handle each step yourself.

All of these steps have elements that you can consider from the day you open your doors. If you build your business so that, one day, you can leave it, the process will be significantly easier — even if you aren’t sure where your path will take you right this moment. By phasing yourself out of your business, you make selling it easier, as well as simply taking a vacation.

Image by Flickr user Grant Laird Jr. (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 28th, 2010 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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