Creating an exit strategy can be filled with a lot of technical jargon and considerations, but don’t lose why you are selling a company.  While running a business and hurtling toward urgent short-term and long-term goals, or perhaps motivated by an urgent reason to sell, you may not take time to reflect deeply on personal goals. You may even be uncomfortable doing so, or don’t know how to start.

Defining your goals as only numbers or dollars misses the mark. Your goals should be larger than getting as much money up front now and having time to golf later. You need to draw a new map with new destinations, because that map will clarify whom to target as buyers, how to structure the deal, and how to time the sale.

It’s important to recognize, as Studs Terkel says in Working, that work doesn’t just give “daily bread” but also “daily meaning.” Don’t underestimate the importance of this to your future happiness. Your goals as an owner who’s preparing to sell a business should align with finding your own new daily meaning.

Your goals should be holistic and cover many facets of your life beyond the numbers. They should be many and multileveled and should fall into categories of financial, business, health and welfare, and life after the sale.  The purpose of this article is to focus on the latter:  after you sell a company, what will life be like?

Life After the Sale

Many business owners and advisors focus intently on preparing the business for sale, but not preparing you, the business owner. To have a successful exit plan, you need an idea about where you’re going, and prepare to fire yourself from the business to make it happen.

Many sellers are consumed simply by running their business, and then they add selling it atop the turmoil of their day job. Having the time, tools, or aptitude to design the next chapter of a satisfying and productive life may not be at the front of your mind amid the chaos of the moment.

Yet, having a compelling vision of your future will help you to shape the nature of the sale, sustain you in getting through it, and end up achieving success as you define it. Business was for Estee Lauder “a magnificent obsession.” If it is the same for you, as it is for many business owners (the author included), what will you replace it with?

Even if they don’t realize it, entrepreneurs, usually an action-oriented group, have to think through what they want and how to get it. Otherwise, the typical Type A personality business owner, whose identity and reason for being may disappear with the sale of their business, will receive a major shock to his or her system. We work not just to pay the bills, but to connect with others, create an identity and sense of purpose, and to matter. The need for all that doesn’t disappear when you sell your business.

I invite you to use these ideas during your journey to sell a business.

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