GET OUT!

The Power of the exit strategy

What a year I have had so far, not only has my book “Live a Better Life – Earn Passive Income Online” gone through its final editing stages and been launched, but I released a brand new bridal issue for my magazine (I’m the founding editor of Sew You! Magazine) and I launched a second book for the year, compiled from the first year’s worth of magazine issues. All of this was done by the 16^th of January 2019.

Honestly, I’m already looking forward to a good holiday, however there’s so much left to do, all of it through my own business, so honestly I can only blame myself for giving myself such a busy schedule – luckily I’m one of these people who can’t sit still for too long.

During all of this I have also been busy reading a brand new book, “Always Looking Up” by Michael J. Fox. I have been so enamored by it, that I find myself reading away any spare moment I have. Although I will go into the book much more fully when I write the book review on it (which I assure you will be soon), I just really felt the need to share this with you.

The book is about Michael J. Fox’s experiences as he goes through setting up his foundation to raise funds to discover a cure for Parkinson’s Disease. His approach right from the beginning is to create a foundation that quite simply won’t last, it will reach its goal, and that would be the end of it.

I’m reminded vaguely of studying business, and how we were taught to approach business with an exit strategy already in place. Before you start a business, know how you are going to get out. Why would you start a business, with the end in mind?

Well firstly, if you want to grow a huge and successful company, according to researchers most companies tend to outgrow their founding entrepreneurs, this is mostly because if the company is to have a long life span, it’s “mindset” and functions would eventually have to change from the small, higher risk growth rate that most entrepreneurs approach business with. So what this means, in rough terms, is that you need to be ready to leave your company, before it gets ready to “boot you out” in a manner of speaking.

Even as an investor in company shares, I hold my shares for the long haul but sell them after five to seven years. Every investment has an exit strategy.

To put it simply, over time everything changes, and quite often we have absolutely no control over that change. When that change happens are you going to find that you have stagnated and been too unwilling to budge?

Be willing, and have a plan to get out. Even if you just become a silent shareholder and board member in your own business. Personally, my magazine and brand is my baby. I have put not just time and financial investment into it, but huge, and I mean HUGE emotional investment. I am incredibly attached to it, which is why I have given myself two exit strategies. Either I build the company and let the next younger generation continue with it, while I hang out on an exotic island, quietly collecting profits, or I out right sell it in all its entirety. Either way what I have spent so many years growing and nurturing will have a way to move forward and become even bigger and better. I’m allowing what I have built to become a legacy in its own right.

It’s also a system that allows me to move on to do other things, I want to fill my life with as many experiences as possible, and do as many things as is possible, which means I have to admit that my business and I will grow apart… and nobody wants to be stuck in a stale relationship of any kind.

That and, quite honestly, one day I want to have to do absolutely no work for active income, I want to take a break, and yes, an early retirement too.

Ask yourself honestly, with everything that you have going on right now in your life, whether you are working for someone else, or you are running your own business. What is your exist strategy? Over time you will grow and evolve, will you allow yourself the possibility and ability to move onto something else? It may possibly something even greater than what you are doing now.