[Sweet Process Series] How to Build a Business That Can Thrive Without You with John Warrillow of Built to Sell

John Warrillow is the Founder of The Value Builder System™, a cloud-based assessment tool that business owners use to assess their company’s scalability. John has helped more than 55,000 business owners improve their company’s value by up to 71%.

He’s the author of Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You. Both Fortune and Inc magazines have recognized the book as one of the best business books. John also wrote The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry, and he hosts Built to Sell Radio, where they interview founders about their exit journey.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• John Warrillow talks about why selling your own company is a sensitive topic for many people
• How to tell your employees about the potential sale of your company
• Why you should productize your service business and the things you need to change in order to do this
• How to niche down your business
• The importance of shifting your mindset in order when selling your business and knowing that you can create another one again
• Major mistakes people make when responding to the question of why they want to sell their business
• John shares stories about founders that mismanaged the sale process
• The Switzerland Structure of building your business

In this episode…

What was your ultimate goal when you built your business? Whatever your reason was, if you don’t build your business like you intend to sell it, your company will most likely not survive even a single day without you. Of course, you don’t have to sell your business if you don’t want to but wouldn’t you want to build a company that can survive any situation? This is the crux of today’s episode with John Warrillow.

Join Dr. Jeremy Weisz as he talks with John Warrillow of The Value Builder System™ on this episode Inspired Insider about the value of building a business that can thrive and survive even without you. Tune in as John explains why people are opposed to selling their company, how they can overcome that mindset, and the steps business owners can make in order to make their company salable even when you have no intention of selling it.

Resources Mentioned on this episode

• Built to Sell
• The Value Builder System™
• Built to Sell Radio
• John Warrillow on LinkedIn
• Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You by John Warrillow
• The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry by John Warrillow
• Debbie King on LinkedIn
• Tony Robbins on LinkedIn
• Rand Fishkin on LinkedIn

 

 

Episode Transcript

Jeremy Weisz

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Some of the past interviews you can check out founder of P90x founder of RX Bar Founder of Atari. They talk about not just the ups but the downs in the journey. This interview is a little bit different. This was for The Process Breakdown Podcast that I did. It was so good that I had to release it on Inspired Insider so stay tuned. And before you get to it, this episode is brought to you by Rise25 which I co founded with my business partner, John Corcoran, what we do is a Rise25 we help b2b businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 partnerships and clients We help you run your podcast, so generates ROI. And the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at a way to give to my best relationships. A podcast for me over over the past 10 years has allowed me to profile others thought leadership and companies and give to them and have them on my podcasts and platform. So if you have questions about podcasting go to Rise25.com you can watch a video my business partner and I bands are like an old married couple. Check out Rise25.com Thanks. Listen to the episode.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, host of The Process Breakdown Podcast where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks and giving your staff everything they need to be successful at their job houseguests. You can look at David Allen of Getting Things Done, Michael Gerber of the E-Myth have many more. Before I introduce today’s guest who needs no introduction, if you should be getting his book if you don’t, I’m not going to say John, they should be ashamed of themselves but like you should, should have gotten Built to Sell. And by the way, we’ll talk a little bit more about that. Whether you want to sell your company or not just having it in your business is makes is critical so you can you know actually not stress out all the time but before we get to that this episode is brought to you by Sweet Process if you have a team members ask you the same questions over and over again and it’s maybe the 10th time you spent explaining it there’s probably a better way a better solution Sweet Process is a software that makes it drop that easy to train and onboard new staff and save time with existing staff and general I was talking to Owen the founder, You know, he was telling me you know, universities use a banks use it hospitals use it, but I didn’t realize that there are some first responder government agencies that use it in life or death situations to run their operation. So, you know, Sweet Process is to document all the repetitive tasks that eat up your precious time. You can sign up for a 14 day trial. There’s no credit card required. Sweet Process.com S-W-E-E-T Process. Today’s guest I’m super excited about John Warrillow is the Founder of The Value Builder System™ and what It is there’s a cloud based assessment tool that business owners use to assess the scalability of their company. And John has helped more than 55,000 business owners improve their company value and get this by up to 71%. And I was reading John like if you go to anyone can go to their site, valuebuildersystem.com/score, and the people who score a certain amount are have a much better, you know, salability and increase salability. So he’s the author of Built to Sell creating businesses can thrive without you, which is recognizable. The fortune Inc, is one of the best business books and he also wrote the automatic customer and he hosts Built to Sell radio where they interview founders about their exit journey. And before founding The Value Builder System™. John started and exit four companies. So, John, thanks for joining me.

John Warrillow

Jeremy’s pleasure.

Jeremy Weisz

You know, I want to start there’s so many good stories in and I meant that everyone should I don’t care if someone says i’m not i’m not going to sell my company ever. I don’t know anyone who really says that actually. Because sometimes they start with I just want to sell my company. And they haven’t started the company yet. But, um, anyone

John Warrillow

hear me? I just did it. I just did a webinar. Yeah. And I was looking at the comments in the beginning, I surveyed people, I said, Hey, are you business owner looking to build value? Or do you want to sell because I’d like to tailor my comments to the to Yeah, and, and then in the comments. I was, I guess, talking too much about selling your company because the guy said, I’m leaving. You’re talking too much about selling. I’m leaving the webinar. And I thought, Man, that guy’s sensitive, but it’s funny. People get very sensitive about the topic of selling your company. It’s like this taboo topic. I remember I was doing one interview with a guy who started out I was doing podcasts when he started off. He said, Oh, you’re the douchebag who wrote Built to Sell. It was like, what’s the opening line and it was this whole idea that he needed like

Jeremy Weisz

a lesson on bond or rapport or something.

John Warrillow

It’s got to get Jeremy lesson. on building rapport, this whole thing was like your, you know, like you’re, you’re propagating this idea that people should build a flip and real companies are built to last and I just couldn’t disagree more my whole thing is build a company so that you could sell if you ever want to and you don’t have to sell but yeah, man, you should build it like an asset as opposed to a job.

Jeremy Weisz

Totally because anyone who’s putting the systems in place to sell their company means someone could take over and it starts to remove you so you could even if you’re gonna work on higher I’m preaching the choir, we’re going higher level things, well, then you can go and do that, you know, and you talk about them Built to Sell, you know, if anyone listens to everyone should listen to it. But here’s the thing, John, you you could tell someone who wrote it and you were in the trenches because I viscerally feel pain throughout the book, when you’re going through different scenarios. And one of them is the scenario of the team in going to the team, on saying because there’s a guilt there when you go to the team and you tell them, they’ve helped me build this, and I’m going to sell them in a cash out talk about the approach in the conversation with the team in in some of the thoughts on that, man,

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