John Warrillow - How To Lay The Groundwork To Sell Your Business

Today we are talking with John Warrillow, who has written three books -  Built To Sell, The Automatic Customer, and The Art Of Selling Your Business. These books cover the basics of how to design your company so that it can be sold in the future, generating revenue from your business, and how to finally make that exit happen. During our chat today, we talked about how to set up your business, why you want to have recurring payments as opposed to a lifetime offer, and how to build a business to potentially scale and exit if it’s built on the back of an influencer or personal brands. 

We cover a lot of ground in this episode and this is a great conversation for our listeners as a lot of folks are building fan bases, thinking about the marketing side of it, and building traffic to them. This is a great conversation to consider what makes up the value of your business, regardless of whether you are going to sell or not. When you’re done get some more advice about selling and acquiring businesses from our conversations with Carl Allen and Dan & Joe Kalis.

“You should focus on branding products in your overall business. So there’s this concept of service providers, coaches and consultants productizing, and it’s the process of making your service look like a thing, ideally making it run as its own entity on an automatic or recurring revenue cycle.” - John Warrillow

Some Topics We Discussed Include:

• Who else wants a “sailboat business”? (putting your feet up while enjoying the view and people are sending you checks)
• Dissecting how Elon Musk runs his business
• Best tactics if you are a digital marketer
• Building a brand into your business so you can eventually walk away
• What’s a trojan horse got to do with your marketing?
• Subscriptions models vs. launch models
• The biggest mistake people make when trying to build a recurring business model and how to get around that
• Why having a monthly payment model beats the one time, lifetime payment
• How to deal with subscription fatigue

Resources From John Warrillow:

• Built To Sell
• The Automatic Customer
• The Art Of Selling Your Business
• BuiltToSell.com
• BuiltToSell.com/Selling - Get some free gifts when you buy the book

References and Links Mentioned:

• Lost And Founder by Rand Fishkin
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• How To Boost The Salability And Valuation Of Your Company - Dan & Joe Kalis
• How To Buy Businesses Without Putting Up Any Money - Carl Allen