Today, we’re talking about ways to structure your business to be sold, even if you’re not actively thinking of selling.
In this episode, Eric breaks down the five critical elements you need to consider to make a business sellable. Stay tuned for five game-changing elements that will help you build a valuable and scalable business that runs successfully, with or without you.
Can It Be Sold?
If your business cannot be sold, you don’t own a business — you own a job. The real test is simple: what happens if you disappear for 90 days? A true business will survive your absence. That standard forces you to build something transferable, stable, and valuable.
Predictable Revenue Creates Stability
You need clear visibility into where your future income will come from. Contracted recurring revenue is the gold standard, and repeat clients follow closely behind that. Revenue predictability allows you to plan investments, manage your cash flow, and reduce risk.
Diverse Client Base
Avoid over-relying on any single client. Overreliance on a single client erodes a business’s value and increases its vulnerability. It’s best to diversify your client base so that no single client accounts for more than 20% of your profit.
Documenting Processes
Document everything. If your systems are not documented, the company has little transferable value. A sales playbook defines your positioning, messaging, objections, and communication style. Standard operating procedures outline your service delivery. Onboarding systems create consistency for clients and vendors. Financial dashboards track KPIs, leading indicators, and lagging indicators.
Strong Leadership
A business that depends entirely on you is fragile, whereas a business supported by capable people is resilient. Delegation increases your business’s scalability and protects you from burnout. If no one else can run your sales, operations, or administration, you become a bottleneck. Strong leadership involves building a team that can take on the business’s responsibilities.
Clean Financials
Buyers look for clarity, transparency, and realistic compensation structures. Messy books reduce confidence and valuation. Always separate your personal expenses from your professional expenses. Maintain a clean profit and loss for the last three years, at least. Understand your margins per project. Create cash flow plans for every confirmed project and consolidate them into a company-wide forecast.
Strategic Positioning
Know your niche. Be clear on how you differentiate yourself. A “me too” business competes on price, and a strategically positioned business competes on value. Brand equity, specialization, and a clear point of difference will increase your profitability and make your business more attractive to buyers.
Freedom
The less the business depends on you, the more valuable it becomes, and the more leverage you gain to shape your future. A sellable business gives you the freedom to focus on what you do best. It reduces stress, allowing you to work on the business instead of constantly working in it.
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“If your business cannot be sold, then you don’t own a business, you own a job.”
Eric Rozenberg
Full transcript of episode 310 of The Business of Meetings podcast, a solo episode with Eric Rozenberg. Lightly edited for readability.
Eric Rozenberg: Hello and welcome to the Business of Meetings podcast. I’m your host, Eric Rozenberg.
Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of helping businesses in the meetings and events industry grow and succeed, and I’m excited to share that experience with you. If you feel alone and overwhelmed, and if you’re looking to take your business to the next level, improve your strategy and sales, and connect with like-minded professionals, you are in the right place. I invite you to visit eventbusinessformula.com and join our community of event business owners dedicated to exponential growth. Now let’s dive into today’s episode.
Hello and welcome to a new episode of the Business of Meetings podcast. Today we’re going to talk about making your business sellable, even if you don’t want to sell it. The truth is that if your business cannot be sold, then you don’t own a business, you own a job. The question that you should ask yourself: what would happen to your business if you disappear for 90 days, if you cannot work for 90 days? And so what I want to talk about today is five elements that you should take into consideration to make your business sellable.
We all have this vision as entrepreneurs of what we want to do with our business, why we start our business, where is it that we want to be going. And if we don’t have that vision, I strongly recommend you work on one. But in part of the vision, many, many times the idea is to develop the business to sell it one day. And quite frankly, even if you don’t think about selling it, at the end of the day, decades later, that’s maybe the moment when you will start thinking about giving the business to the next generation, selling the business, or unfortunately, if you don’t have any legacy aspect, whether it’s with somebody you know or with a potential buyer, then you’ll have to close it. And the number of businesses that are closing every day is just mind-blowing.
Let’s talk today about the five elements that you should take into consideration to make your business sellable.
The first thing is you need to have some idea of what the future revenue are going to be. Ideally, you want to have recurring revenue. That’s the best thing. If you have contracts, when you have every month cash that is coming in, that’s the best solution, of course. And at least the second best solution is to have repeat clients. My first business, the corporate event agency, I had a lot of repeating clients, which of course was great. I have one or two long-term contracts, but the fact that we had revenue coming, we could plan in advance, we knew how many months in advance what the cash position was going to be and how we could make investment based on that.
So having obviously recurring revenue is the best, then having repeated clients is second best, but you need to have some sort of visibility. And also in terms of your client base, you don’t want to have a client that is representing more than 20% of your profit. I say profit, not revenue. Even for revenue, you don’t want to have a client representing more than 20% of revenue. But really, in terms of profit, if you have more than 20% of your profit coming from one client, that is a dangerous situation. God forbid something happen, you’ll be in big trouble.
Of course, when you start your business, listen, the first client represents 100% of the revenue and the profit. But as you move forward and as you keep developing your business, make some time and focus on diversifying the number of clients, making sure you’re not too dependent on one or two clients. So first thing, having a way of predicting revenue in the future.
The second is document all the processes. You have to have a sales playbook. And what is a sales playbook? Obviously, we can spend hours on it, but it’s how you sell, how you communicate, what is your positioning, what are people that are not familiar with your company should know about your business. It’s also including all the different types of objections that you are getting and how you are answering those objections. So it’s really everything related about the sales. Start with the vision, the mission, the values, and then go into the whole sales process.
And you also need to have, in terms of processes, how you are delivering the events, this famous SOPs, standard operating procedure. And yes, I know for those who are already advanced when it comes to AI implementation, those are the agent swarms that are now existing and will be definitely coming up, where you might not need as much the SOPs that you needed in the past. But at the end of the day, you need to understand how the event is being delivered in order to work with the right agent. So anyway, have an idea of the best process when it comes to event delivery.
You also need to have an onboarding system for your client. What are you telling them? How are you in touch with them? How are you, as the business owner, but also your team, in touch with them? And also when it comes to the vendors, the different vendors that you have, what is the template that you have for negotiation? I always say don’t play the bank in one way or another. In other words, don’t charge your client for money that you won’t need before six months. But on the other hand, don’t pay the vendor if you haven’t received the money from your client.
Obviously, this is easier said than done, but when I had my corporate event agency, we had a rule that I needed to have at least 90% of all the revenue in the bank account a maximum of a week before the program. If not, we’re not running the program. It was clearly stated from the beginning. It’s just a question of managing the risk for the business.
And of course, in terms of processes, you need to have a financial dashboard. You need to know your numbers. You need to have your key performance indicators in a dashboard. You need to know your leading indicators, your lagging indicators. That’s one of the sessions where we review everything with the people that I’m coaching. But that’s absolutely essential, to know your numbers. And we always say if it lives in your head, your company value is zero. Make sure that, again, if you are absent for a certain time, the business continues.
So, one, having an idea of the future revenue. Two, document the processes. Three, it’s about your leadership. Are you involved in everything, or can someone else run the sales, or run the operations, or run all the administration? If the answer is no one else can run it, you are the bottleneck and you are a liability for your business.
Remember, my first two years with my first business, it was like, those are my clients, nobody’s going to do it better, it’s my business, it’s my brand. And long story short, I was driving 150 miles an hour into a wall, where I was going to be completely burned out. And so after two years, something clicked and I start hiring project managers and surrounding myself with the right people. So in terms of the leadership, just make sure that no one does it alone. Make sure that you have the support. Make sure that also people around you are taking over some of the responsibilities. You cannot do everything on your own.
The fourth element you need to think about to have a sellable business is to have clean financials. I know a lot of businesses, business owners, you will put some cost, some charge which are not 100% related to the business on the business. We won’t go into the details of that, but the bottom line is if you are one day thinking about selling your business, at least the last three years has to be extremely clean. In other words, any personal expenses that you used to put on the business should be put somewhere else. You need to separate what is personal and what is professional. You need to have a clean P&L and you need also to have a clear idea of the margin per event. That will not only help you to analyze the type of events that you’re running, the type of business that you’re having, the type of clients that you’re chasing, but also it will give you the visibility on the cash flow.
So what we had when I had my corporate event agency is that we had a cash flow plan per project. In other words, we knew from the moment that the project was confirmed, when we were going to send the invoice to the client to be paid on time, when we were going to pay the vendors, how much, and that gave us an idea of the expected profit as well, which was a management tool that we can use every month to see if the project manager was on track with what was planned. But every time we had a confirmed project, we had a new cash flow plan, we will give it to the accounting so that it was consolidated into the cash flow plan for the entire company. And if you don’t have that, quite frankly, how can you make a decision on investment? How do you know that you can afford having a new team member? How do you know that you can invest in XYZ? So it’s very important to have this cash flow visibility for your business.
And having clear financials also gives you a good idea for a potential buyer of the dependency or the low dependency on you. I know some people, when they’re going to sell their business, oh, yeah, but I’m only paying myself, I don’t know, 30,000 a year. Yeah, good luck to find somebody else to run the business for 30,000 a year. So it has to be realistic, it has to be clearly identified. But also, the less it is depending on you, the higher the value of the business. And I can tell you, for sure, those who are buying businesses, the last thing that they want is having messy books, things that are not clear, that are not able to identify different elements of the P&L, and worse, that you cannot even explain what it is. So having clean financials is extremely important.
And the fifth element is really what is the strategic positioning that you have. If you have identified your clear niche, if you know exactly how you’re differentiating yourself, and one of my sessions I explain how you can differentiate yourself from the competition so that you are really seen as a strategic partner, what is your approach. So it’s basically all of this, elements of your positioning and elements of your brand equity. If you are new to agency, if you’re a new to business, fine. But from the moment that you can differentiate yourself, and the moment that you’re known for something specific, that will always increase the value of your business.
So the five elements, before I get into the conclusion, the five elements to make your business sellable, even if you don’t want to sell it: one, you need to have some sort of predictable revenue, revenue in the future, where they’re going to come from and how they’re going to come. Two, you have to have all your processes documented. Three, you need to make sure that you have a leadership team, that you are not the person who’s running everything and without whom the business cannot run. Four, you need to have clean financials. And five, you have to have a good positioning, knowing exactly your niche and what you are known for.
What is having a business which is sellable going to give you, in one word? Freedom. Again, you don’t have to sell your business, but if your business is sellable, it means that all the points that I just mentioned are in place. And it means what? It means that you can focus on what you do best. You can focus on what you like the most. You can focus on the why you started a business in the first place. So it will help you in terms of your financial freedom or your personal freedom. It will reduce your stress. And as I already mentioned, the less you are involved in your business, the higher the valuation will be. And so usually, when you have put all of this in place, you have a more profitable business, you have a more stable business, it’s definitely not depending on you anymore. So there’s some sort of rules or some sort of organization, which is really what you want to have.
So making your business sellable, even if you don’t want to sell it, means that you’re going to have a real business, that you will be able to work on your business instead of being in your business, in the trenches all the time. And if you go back to the why you started the business in the first place, having a sellable business will help you answer the question: where do you want to be needed? Where is it that you want to spend your time? Do you want to be needed, or do you want to be free? Do you want people saying, “Oh my god, you know so well, thank you, it’s great that you’re here, without you we’re going to do anything”? Or do you want to have leverage? And that’s what is really important for me in terms of having your own freedom.
It’s to have a business that can run without you. It’s to have a business where you have predictable revenue. It’s to have a business where the processes are well documented, where having a business where the EBITDA is clearly identified and very precise and totally in line with reality. And at the end of the day, I would say build it, build a strong business, build it strong so you can sell it, and finally you’ll have the freedom to keep it without being in the wheel, running from one project to another like a chicken with no head.
So make your business sellable, even if you don’t want to sell it. Thank you, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
Thank you for tuning in to the Business of Meetings podcast. I hope you found today’s episode valuable. If you enjoyed the show, the most important thing you can do is leave a review and share it with your colleagues. It really helps spread the word. I truly appreciate your support. And if you’re ready to take your business to the next level, don’t forget to visit eventbusinessformula.com to learn more about how we are helping event business owners like you. Thanks again for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
