Making Your Company Run Without You, So It Is Worth More

A company runs without its owner when the way it does business is captured in systems and not in people’s heads. That means defining each important process and building it into software that guides staff through it the same way every time. A buyer pays more for a business that keeps working after the owner leaves, and can see that it will, because the process is in the system and the numbers come out of it.

Signs this is your problem

• The business slows down or stalls when you take a week off.
• Important decisions wait for you because only you know the answer.
• A few long-serving employees hold knowledge that is written nowhere.
• Training a new hire takes months of shadowing.
• You would like to sell or retire in the next few years.
• An adviser or buyer has asked how the business would run without you.

Why a business that depends on you is worth less

A buyer is purchasing future profit. If that profit depends on what you know, whom you know, and the judgment calls you make every day, the buyer is really being asked to buy you, and you are the one thing that is leaving. The same is true of the two or three long-serving employees who “just know” how things are done.

Buyers and their advisers look for it directly. They ask what happens when a key person is away, how new staff are trained, and whether the reports they are shown come from a system or from someone’s spreadsheet.

The franchise idea

In The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber argues that every business should be built as if it were going to be franchised: each process defined so clearly that ordinary people can produce consistently good results by following it. A franchise can be handed to a new owner because the system, not the founder, makes it work.

Most owners agree with this and never get to it, because writing procedures is tedious and binders go out of date. Software changes that. When the process is built into an application, the system itself is the procedure. Staff are led through each step, the rules are applied automatically, and nothing depends on anyone remembering how it is done.

What changes when the process lives in software

• Work is done the same way every time, whoever is on duty.
• New people become productive quickly, because the system shows them what to do.
• You can step back. Decisions that used to need you are handled by rules you set.
• The numbers are real. Performance comes straight from the system, which is what a buyer wants to see.
• Growth does not break things. A second location or shift follows the same process.
• The software itself is an asset that goes with the business.

Where to start

Not with everything. Start with the process that most depends on you or on one key person: quoting, scheduling, pricing, the thing only you can approve. Capturing that single process usually gives the biggest gain in both freedom and value, and it shows what the rest of the company could look like.

How Keene Systems handles it

1. We talk about where you want to be. Selling, stepping back, or simply getting your time back.
2. We find the processes that depend on particular people. And rank them by risk and value.
3. We define each one with the people who do it. In plain English, agreed by you.
4. We build it into an application. One process at a time, starting with the one that matters most.

The next step is a short, no-pressure conversation. Book a call with Lance Keene or use the form on this page.