REDUCE YOUR LOSSES AND MOVE INTO A NEW AREA OF INTEREST — Series: Why Selling Your Business Can be the Best Decision.
In my introductory post, I wrote on how selling your business can be one of the best decisions you ever make and how you can stand the chance to gain several rewards, financial and non-financial.
Running a business comes with the potential for many different types of risk. Some hazards could destroy your company, while others may cause serious damage and require costly repairs — time consuming tasks that you might not have enough time to finish. Selling your business is a potential solution with the capacity to help you to reduce risk in a number of ways, ranging from how you will be able to diversify your portfolio, so that you are not reliant on a single income stream to how you can now take a step back from day-to-day operations, giving you more time to focus on strategic planning and long-term growth. Additionally, you’ll also have the option to sell your stake and reallocate it to other projects that you may want to explore.
Mark Lore is a seasoned American entrepreneur, investor and NBA owner, with a proven track record in the ecommerce space. He is the founder and CEO of Jet.com, an online retailer that he sold to Walmart, Inc. for $3.3 billion in 2016. Before this business sale, Lore also co-founded Quidsi, the parent company of a family of websites including Diapers.com, which was sold to Amazon for $545 million in 2010. From September, 2016, he resumed his role as the President and CEO of Walmart U.S. eCommerce, where he was appointed to head Walmart’s e-commerce division.
In 2021, Lore stepped down from his full — time role and announced that his next big entrepreneurial swing will be something far afield from his current expertise: a multi-decade project to build “a city of the future” supported by “a reformed version of capitalism”, as reported by Vox Media’s Recode.
This flexibility displayed by Marc Lore was fuelled by his decisions to put his business up for sale whenever the time came to move on and yes, it turned out to be a win — win situation.
Whether the risk is financial or strategic, serious enough to damage your reputation or it’s already interrupting the flow of business, it may be time to make the decision. If you’re simply tired of having to deal with so many business risks and the toll it’s taking on your business, or maybe you just want to venture into something new, Like Mr. Lore- then, this is for YOU.
There are different ways to go about the sale: approaching investors, consulting agencies, buyouts from other companies (either directly or through acquisition), auctions/online sales among others. However it goes, one thing you should have in mind isn’t just finding buyers, rather, the priority is to find people with whom you share the same business values, to grow and nourish your business like you would.
In my next post, I will be touching on some key factors to consider before making the decision to sell your business.
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