*Please note: Double to Sell is being postponed to a yet to be specified date in October or November 2020. Thank you, Colleen 

With my upcoming event, Double to Sell with Cameron Herold: How to Make a Cash Rich Exit, one of my pre-occupations lately has been business owners’ reasons to sell. At the May event, we’re going to talk mostly about the HOW, but I find the WHY is equally intriguing.

So I was excited to re-connect with my friend & serial entrepreneur Chris Stanton, and I’m thrilled to tell you he’ll be one of our event panelists for Lessons from the Trenches at Double to Sell.

Chris is a self-described serial entrepreneur who founded, scaled and sold two technology consulting companies. In this episode of I’m a Millionaire! So Now What? we dove into the WHYs of selling a business and came up with 4 motivations from his experience alone.

1. When trends change, some business owners sense it’s time to pivot to the next big idea.
2. Sometimes the market comes to you and urges you to sell.
3. Sometimes selling is the only way forward.
4. Some business owners get a strong pull to give back and make an even bigger impact.

1. Changing Trends = time to pivot

Chris’ first business was Capital Technology Partners, helping Canadian federal government agencies purchase and use new CRM software. Chris jumped on a learning opportunity offered by Google to see what was coming down the pipe, and…

“We spent three days on the Google campus. This is back when people just thought of Google as an ad search and a search engine. So they showed us all the enterprise software products they were working on, so that kind of blew me away for three days. And I came back to Canada, and I said to my partner at the time, we’ve got to get on this train. We should become an enterprise partner for Google on these software products. So we called up our contacts at Google, and we put a little business together. And we became the only partner in Canada to sell Google enterprise software which was neat.”

 

2. Sell when the market is ready

Chris told me that spotting a great opportunity leads right to a sale.

“…sometimes you have to pivot, and that pivot actually leads to an exit. What happened was, the largest Google software provider and partner in the US ended up buying our Canadian organisation because they wanted North American expansion. So the CRM business was great, but it was because of that pivot we’re able to drive a lot of business value in the first place, and we ended up selling that.”

3. Sell when it’s the next best step.

A couple of weeks ago, I introduced another of our Lessons from the Trenches panelists, Paul Vallée. Paul talked about how great business ideas can spin off further great business ideas, but it’s almost impossible to scale multiple businesses and make them all successful. He called it the Turducken Problem – seizing the opportunity to split multiple businesses to ensure each business gets the ‘oxygen’ it deserves.

Chris experienced a similar dilemma with his cloud-based ERP solution business. The business was a market-leader, at a crossroads:

“Out of the blue, we had four companies approach us. And we had a choice to make. I was partners with my brother-in-law, and I said, here’s the crossroads we have. We can struggle this out and keep building the business, but now that we know that big guys are coming in, they’re coming in and they’ve got big pocketbooks, so it’s going to get a little harder for us. And when you have four people at the table, maybe this is the time we can negotiate a good deal. So we all agreed that was the way forward.”

4. Sell when it’s time to give back.

Growing a business isn’t easy. Every seasoned entrepreneur has failures, or near misses, or teachable moments – call them what you will. And knowing how hard entrepreneurship can be, lots of former founders simply want to help others avoid the deep dips they experienced along the way. Which brings us to Chris enjoying his latest role:

“As part of the purchase and sale, I ended up working for PricewaterhouseCoopers as a partner for four and half years running the division that they had bought from us. And now I’m helping advise other start-ups and enjoying paying it forward a little bit. You come to a point in your career where it’s nice to help some of the other younger generation coming up in their endeavours. As everyone knows, there’s a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of headaches as you’re building your own company, so if you can help some people avoid some of those, you’re happy to pay it forward and pass it on.”

As I mentioned before, I’m thrilled that Chris will bring all this experience and insight to Lessons from the Trenches as a panelist at Double to Sell: How to Make a Cash Rich Exit.

As we’re talking about the twists and turns of Chris’s serial entrepreneurship, a classic song pops into my head:

“You've got to know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run.
You never count your money
When you're sittin' at the table
There'll be time enough for countin'
When the dealin's done.”

So how do you know when to hold or fold?

I’ll give the last word on that to Jim Collins, author of Built to Last:

“The important step is to get at the deeper, more fundamental reason for the organization’s existence. An effective way to get at purpose is to pose the question “Why not just shut this organization down, cash out, and sell off the assets?” and to push for an answer that would be equally valid both now & one hundred years into the future.”