Owning a Business
A Resource for Business Owners on Substack
Every business owner faces the same set of problems. How to protect the value of what you’ve built. How to manage the relationships that keep the business running. How to position the business for a sale that actually pays off.
Owning a Business covers all of it, buying, running, selling, and advising a
business, written by a consultant who has spent decades in the room where these decisions get made.
I have watched many business owners fail. Enough to notice a pattern. The successful ones were not necessarily the most talented or the best capitalized. They made good decisions. They made decisions with the right people in the room, at the right time, and, after monitoring, made revisions as needed.
The ones who failed had owners making decisions alone, under pressure, and without a process. These decisions were not good in that they had bad results. The bad result was not from a lack of intelligence or commitment. It was the absence of structure — a way of making decisions with others, documenting them, and acting on them with discipline.
That observation became the basis for my consulting practice
The Reader Promise
Planning is documenting a series of decisions. With a quality decision making process embedded in the business, there can be effective long-term (succession) planning and short-term (operational) planning implemented.
Owning a Business can help you embed a quality decision-making process, plan using the Prior Diligence strategy, and operate with the Dynamic Planning format.
My promise to you is that Owning a Business will help you maximize income and realize maximum value from your business interest.
Why This Is Different
Most business content is prescriptive, telling an owner what an author thinks is the answer.
This publication is procedural. It teaches a values-based planning methodology: decisions made by a group, grounded in the articulated values of each member, with a Prior Diligence strategy, and with Dynamic Planning documented and communicated across the entire business. The solution to business problems comes from the group and their values — not from an owner looking in a mirror.
What This Publication Is
Owning a Business is written for owners of a business interest, many owner-managed, where the owner’s decisions determine whether the business succeeds or fails, grows or stagnates, sells for maximum value or far less than it is worth.
The publication is organized around the problems owners actually face: cash flow, growth, personnel, exit strategy, and conflict among owners. Each problem has a solution that follows the same methodology — a group decision-making process documented in a planning format that communicates decisions and results across the entire business. That methodology has two named components: Prior Diligence — the strategy of investigating your own business before a buyer does, resolving problems on your terms, and preparing for a sale that produces maximum value. Prior Diligence is not just an exit strategy. It is the discipline of running a business as if it could be sold at any time — which makes it a better business in every other respect as well. Dynamic Planning — the documentation format that allows decisions made at the policy level to be communicated downward to operations, and results and experience at the operational level to be communicated upward to the policy-making group. When Dynamic Planning is working, the business makes better decisions faster, and the owner is not the only one who knows what is happening.
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