You might have started a business for any or many of these reasons:

• You had a new, innovative idea
• You saw an existing business, and knew you could execute better
• You wanted to know there was no cap, ever, on your earning power
• You wanted to create and control your own destiny
• You simply wanted to be your own boss

Some people feel like they were born ‘entrepreneurial’ - they’re comfortable with creativity, risk and follow-through.

But some entrepreneurs are bred. They start businesses not because they’d always wanted to, but rather, like my guest Sherry Deutschmann, founder of the US-based company LetterLogic, to stop feeling fed up!

You can hear our interview on last week’s episode of I’m a Millionaire! So Now What? (listen & subscribe here), where Sherry admits:

“I was a single mom, actually a single grandmother at the time, working for a (US) company that printed and mailed hospital bills. We were in a phase, which lasted way too long, where we were making constant mistakes. Instead of being the Vice President of Sales, I felt my role was more like a professional apologist. I went to my boss to talk with him about ways that we could get my coworkers more engaged, caring more about their work, so that we wouldn't have so many mistakes. And he patted my hand and told me I didn't know anything about business and just to go sell another account. And so, out of frustration, I followed his directions and did go sell another account, but I did it for my own company, not for his.”

Entrepreneurs are passionate, that’s for sure.

When you’re responsible for dreaming up, directing and sustaining the vision, purpose and standards for a company, you need a certain amount of fuel to keep the fire going. So most (not all, but most) businesses are created out of passion.

Life after the business is an afterthought.

That doesn’t have to be the case, though. That shouldn’t be the case.

If you’re like most business owners your business is the bulk of your personal wealth. And if you’re like all human beings, there will come a day that you can no longer fuel the fire of your business.

You WILL leave your business, at some point. That’s for certain. You might be ready for a new opportunity. You might be ready to take a break – short, long or absolute (aka retirement). You might (heaven forbid) be forced to leave so you can attend to medical or aging issues – your own or loved ones’.

Is your vision for the end just to shut it all down and walk away? I doubt it. So it makes absolute sense to me to reverse engineer your exit. (Yes -- that’s a theme this month: reverse-engineering success!)

And you have multiple selling options:

• Family succession
• Management buy-out
• A strategic sale, merger or acquisition
• Selling to produce capital to reinvest so the business can scale & grow
• Selling your business for the investment – like private equity

Then you’re up against valuing your business and figuring out how to communicate its value to get a good price.

Which is what I talk about with Adam Nihmey, Managing Director of the Valuation and Litigation Support Group at Welch Capital Partners in EP 102 of I’m a Millionaire! So Now What?

Adam articulated beautifully the most common challenge of selling, and leaving, your business – and what you can start doing NOW to better prepare for valuation:

“Build a business that has a stand-alone value away from your own contributions. It doesn’t mean that you’re not valuable. It doesn’t mean that you don’t drive a lot of the value of the business. You really have to think about value from the eyes of a buyer and not from the eyes of a seller. You have to estimate, associate value with the buyer’s ability to generate profit and cash flow on a go-forward basis - not by what you’ve accomplished in the past. Because valuation is based on future cash flows not past cash flows.”

There is loads of information on why and how to start a business, but I feel my members of the Self Made Nation are missing the sage advice that will help them reverse engineer a sound exit.

Exactly why I created Double to Sell! To support you in getting the value you want from your business.

If you haven’t started to think about how you’ll shift into your next stage of life, now is the perfect time to start. You are who Double to Sell is designed for. I say it’s for you “if you’re planning an exit in the next 10 years,” but it’s also for you if you have no idea when you’ll exit.

Because you never know when a new opportunity will come along, or a new reality will pull you away from your business. Like Adam says in our interview: “… the earlier the better.”