Looking to sell your company? Follow this 4-step process to boost your valuation.

There is a key criteria investors consider when looking to acquire:

“Will the business continue to run itself after the founder leaves?”

Investors are very alert towards this issue because businesses that are over-reliant on the founder’s singular capability, or dependent on manual labor risk falling apart after acquisition.

Proofing your company against this very issue, will derisk your buyer and ultimately lead you to receive a higher valuation: a win-win deal.


Here are 4 practical steps you can take to ensure higher valuation for you and peace of mind for your buyer:

1.    Identify areas of rudimentary, repetitive tasks.
This may be areas where you or your employees have been filling in with time-burning, manual labor such as:

•   Filling data sheets/CRMs
•   Identifying data patterns
•   Responding to basic customer inquiries and reoccurring tickets
•   Creating product catalogs
•   Finding leads
•   Other tasks that are unique to the nature of your business

2.    Automate. Build a system of software that reduce your time spent on these tasks by 90%. Write down list of requirements and vet the solutions that work best for your business. Here are some examples:

•   Zapier: Automate workflows between different web apps.
•   Sendbird: Build your own customer chatbot
•   Hypatos: Extract data from PDFs
•   ActiveCampaign: Automate email sending based on conditional logic
•   Thirdi: Have a team of AI experts build custom AI automations unique to your business

3.    Continue to collect cost, revenue, and profit data for the next 3 ~ 6 months. With optimized workflows & offset labor costs you should be able to show a pattern of lower costs, higher profit margins and potentially higher revenue from newfound efficiency.

4.    List your company at a higher multiple. Companies that have tech enabled operations/business models are perceived as having a better moat and higher value. This premium is amplified when the software is unique to your business (not available to your competitors) and powered by custom AI solutions.


Don't settle for a mediocre valuation when you’ve put in your blood, sweat and tears growing your business.

By following these four business-transforming steps, you'll not only be doing your investors a huge favor, but you’ll be giving your employees meaningful work instead of drudging tasks, and will be securing a lucrative exit that rewards you for your hard work and innovation.

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