Does your entire business depend on you? In this post, we explain owner centricity and how it becomes a hurdle when you want to sell your business.
First of all, owner centricity is the measurement of how critical the owner of the business is to the operations of the business. If you, as the business owner, have all the specialized knowledge, training and experience that make your business successful, it will be extremely difficult to sell your business when the time comes to do so.
There’s a great book called The E Myth by Michael Gerber. In it, he talks about the difference between working in your business and working on your business. Now, it is quite the process to take everything you know and transfer it into the business. You do that through systems, training and mentoring, and it takes a lot of time to do it well. But that transfer of knowledge is the real value of what most entrepreneurs have built as a business. The trick is to make your business a transferable unit so that anyone can buy it and pick up where you left off because you’ve turned your knowledge and experience into systems that are repeatable and scalable.
One of the things we do at Leading Edge Growth is help with succession and exit planning. I have a quiz that I’m happy to share with you called The Owner Centricity Quiz, which will lead you through diagnostic questions that help you understand how much you are currently the center of your business. You can take it on your own, and then we can meet to debrief the quiz and determine the action items you can take to reduce your level of owner centricity. That way, when you’re ready, you’ll be able to sell your business more successfully.
It can be hard to look objectively at your business when you’re the owner, and that’s why we’re here to help you truly understand where you sit, what your opportunities are, and how to move your business forward. If you’re ready to set your business up for success, let’s meet to discuss your level of owner centricity and how we can reduce it together.