Happy Friday!

In case we haven't met, I'm Kevin (aka KO), founder of Diffactory, where we help business owners figure out what their company is actually worth and what to do about it. I'm a Certified Exit Planning Advisor, a black belt, and a skateboarder who grew up in his mom's board shop, which taught me about what happens when a business consumes a family and leaves them with nothing to show for it. That's more or less why I do this work.

I send one email a week with everything I'm learning about building businesses that don't fall apart when the founder steps away. Founder HQ is the community where we go deeper. It's on Skool, it's where the owners who are actually doing the work hang out.

Let's roll....

How I learned to sell the unsellable

It was the fall of 2007, the financial crisis was tipping over, and I had just taken a job as Director of Marketing for United Country Auction Services. That’s where I first learned about the accelerated marketing method (auctions), which is still my favorite way to sell things.

Next thing I knew, the housing market collapsed, and we were divesting entire portfolios from Arvest Bank, Bank of America, and every other institution with too many shaky assets on their balance sheets.

Businesses, houses, commercial property, you name it, and we sold it.

We ended up building a team whose sole job was to market these events.

Little did I know that almost twenty years later, this experience would allow me to help people in a similar manner.

Why owners transition

Most people hear “business transition” and think crisis or retirement.

Here’s what most people don’t realize. The majority of transitioning founders aren’t in crisis at all.

They’re simply done.

Tired of certain parts, ready to access liquidity, or just want to pursue something new.

These are all valid reasons, and all deserving of a transparent process, not a Hail Mary listing on a marketplace.

More options than many think

Last week, I mentioned that most owners think the choice is between selling everything and keeping it running. That is almost never the full picture. A business transition isn’t just selling everything to one buyer.

That’s one option, but here are five more:

1. You can sell the entire operating business to a strategic acquirer, a competitor, private equity, an employee, or an individual buyer.
2. You can run an asset auction and surface buyers you’d never find through a listing, selling inventory, equipment, IP, brand, domain, social media, real estate, whatever has value.
3. You can sell the real estate and the business together to maximize the combined bid, or separate them to attract different buyer pools.
4. You can sell a component: a website, a brand, a customer list, a product line, a territory, or a division. Sometimes the parts are worth more than the whole.
5. You can sell digital assets and IP that most traditional sales teams completely overlook, such as domains, social followings, trademarks, proprietary processes, and client databases.
6. You can run a strategic liquidation, which is a real choice and not a last resort. A well-run liquidation auction recovers significantly more than a rushed wind-down.

The point is that there are options.

Talk soon,

-KO

What we’re building

We’re in the initial stages of putting together an accelerated marketing event to help businesses and owners we believe in.

We’re looking for businesses that the traditional market would pass on or situations where the seller needs to move on a defined timeline.

When we get ten qualified businesses, we will put them into one event and market the living heck out of it, just like we have thousands of times.

If this sounds like something you’d want to explore, hit reply. If you know someone who’s been stuck, looking for a time-definite path to closure, send them our way. We offer a referral fee as a thank you for the introduction.