Exit Planning Tools for Business Owners

leadership

Lifestyle or Legacy – Part 4

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Last week a client told me “You are wrong. I have a lifestyle business that is ALSO a legacy business.” Sorry, but that doesn’t fly.

He has built a good company, and continues to improve it. Be he is not driving to make it into something that carries on beyond him. His objective is to (eventually) make it large enough to be acquired, and for enough money to live in luxury for the rest of his life.

That is a lifestyle business. It’s only purpose is to fund the financial aspirations of the owner. There is no larger purpose, no overarching vision of something beyond his quality of life. I’ll grant that his personal ambition extends beyond his current, very comfortable existence. But it only extends to a more comfortable existence. That is a matter of degree, not direction.

When I started to think about this series, the term “lifestyle” was easy. The second term was originally “entrepreneurship.” That didn’t communicate the concept well enough. Thinking through the topic, it reduced the definition of “lifestyle” to more of just making a good living, and of “entrepreneurship” to building something larger than merely a decent living.

What I am talking about encompasses ANY lifestyle you choose. Whether it is a nice house in the ‘burbs, or sailing around the world in a yacht, that is still lifestyle. We all have different targets.

Legacy is when it moves beyond you, when the company becomes a vehicle for accomplishing something larger than your personal quality of life. By that definition there are probably legacy businesses that don’t provide a luxurious lifestyle, but they satisfy the owner’s desired level of creature comforts and support that bigger vision. Perhaps something that allows an owner to go on missions to Africa for half of each year might qualify. For the most part, however, owners have to reach a pretty comfortable lifestyle before legacy comes into the picture.

Most legacy businesses were lifestyle businesses first. The owners scratched and pushed (or were incredibly lucky) to build a level of security and sustainability. Once they got here, however, they looked around and said “This isn’t enough. Mere wealth doesn’t fill the need I have inside of me.”

Another owner said to me ” I want a legacy business. I want to go visit my outlying offices and not fix problems. I’d fly in, give awards to the top performers, and take a major client out for golf.”

That is also a lifestyle business. The legacy owner wouldn’t be coming in to fix problems either. He or she might be looking for an acquisition in that market, or communicating new goals. He might be upgrading personnel; not because they were failing, but because he was constantly looking to do better. The numbers are still important, but they aren’t going towards improving his lifestyle, they are being used to build the legacy.

Before you start worrying about the lifestyle vs. legacy decision, let me make something plain. Some 80% of small businesses fail in their first few years. Of those that survive, probably 90% never achieve the lifestyle level of success. There are very, very few owners who reach a point where they can work as little as they want and make as much as they want.

Some do, and a few of those think “OK. Is that it?” Some of those can’t envision anything else. Some start building a legacy.

To quote Nancy Barcus: “The closer one gets to the top, the more one finds that there is no “top.”

Lifestyle or Legacy – Part 3

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Let’s turn to the Legacy Builders.They are the business owners who have achieved Lifestyle status (as defined in the last posting) but continue to work hard to build their businesses. Their objective is a company that does far more than merely provide a comfortable lifestyle and assure retirement.

A little bit of elimination to start, as we did with the Lifestyle owners. Just as we said a Lifestyle Business was neither a pumped-up hobby nor merely an adjunct to an alternative lifestyle, the Legacy owner isn’t a couple of things that people might normally assume.

Let’s set a baseline. The typical Legacy Builder runs a business that is very capable of continuing its day to day activities independently and indefinitely. Operations, management and sales are handled by competent employees. In fact, each is probably better than the owner at what he or she does. They are in the top 1% of American incomes. It varies widely, but we’ll call it a minimum of $500,000 a year. The Legacy Builder nonetheless chooses to work a full (45-50 hour) week to continue developing and improving the business, and not incidentally adding to its profit.

The Legacy builder is clearly not obsessive-compulsive, a workaholic, or in any other way driven unwillingly to work beyond common sense. It’s easy for observers (and sometimes family) to accuse the Legacy Builder of being enslaved to the job, unable to tear away for a personal life. That isn’t true at all. The Legacy Builders I am describing spend time with family and other pursuits. They coach Little League, attend recitals, and are active in the community. They take nice vacations (usually with family), and live in nice homes (often several of them), but are seldom ostentatious.

It is true that they are frequently missing in the devotion of time to community activities, preferring to fund the work of others. In fairness, I’ve spent a lot of time working in community organizations. There is a lot of wasted time. If I had the money to pay for someone else to do it, I probably would. Legacy Builders don’t like to have their time wasted.

They are also not greedy. Their continued push for improvement is not for the personal gain. They seek greater success for other reasons. As Bill Gates once said, “Money is just a way to keep score.”

I call them the Legacy Builders because they have an eye for a target that is beyond merely running a successful business. They have a bigger picture; a larger objective in mind. Developing an organization that lives beyond their own careers is at the core of their strategy, but it isn’t just monument-building that drives them. It is what that organization can accomplish.

Some are motivated by the benefit to the community that their talent can deliver. More jobs, more people who can provide security for their families. For others it is even a greater community responsibility, the money to form a foundation, or to fund worthwhile causes. For others their family is the motivation. They seek to change the lifestyle of their children, and their children’s children, permanently (or at least for the next few generations).

Many of the Legacy Builders are simply entrepreneurs without a limit on their creative drive. Most business owners have a difficult time looking backwards. Yesterday’s achievements are ancient history. They see no point to basking in past accomplishments when there is so much more that could be done.

Some Legacy Builders attempt things for the thrill of accomplishment. Once attained, the successes immediately become the basis for the next level, the next mountain to climb.

Admittedly, a substantial number of Legacy Builders have a head start when compared to bootstrap entrepreneurs. They achieved a substantial level of success in an existing organization, and used that as a spring board for their own purposes. They may come from a family where there was Legacy-type success in the past. They may have just been lucky. But none of those things explain their push for greater achievement in business when they are long past the point at which most owners would be satisfied; and there are plenty of bootstrap start-ups in the Legacy class to disabuse the notion that the game is fixed at the start.

Most Lifestyle owners say that they really want to reach Legacy levels, but few actually do. In my next post, the last in this series, we’ll look at what it takes to make the leap from Lifestyle to Legacy.

A Goal isn’t a Finish Line

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I was going over some productivity numbers with a long term client.

“Remember when our goal for this was 2000 man hours?” he said. “Now we are below 1200, and closing in on 1100, and with greater volume!”

Everywhere we looked his numbers were at levels we couldn’t have imagined 10 years ago. I don’t mean numbers he couldn’t have hit back then, but numbers we literally couldn’t have imagined. Some of it is the result of investments in technology, in better systems and in training.Most of it, however, is because he has developed a culture of always, always looking for the next improvement.

Note well that I said he has developed a culture. This business has about 100 employees. As the owner, he knows full well that he is not capable of setting a target and dragging every one of those 100 people to it. He has developed an expectation, at least among his management, that arriving at a goal is merely setting the starting point for the next goal.

I’ve been thinking about how unusual that is.For most small business owners goals are a normal part of managing our companies. Sales goals, production goals, efficiency goals. We work hard to make them, set employee incentives around them, and celebrate when we achieve them. But very few of us start immediately on the next goal. We want to give our people (and ourselves) a break. We are programmed to let people enjoy the achievement; to rest a bit before we start again.

I commented on how unusual it is to have built an organization where the key people look at a goal as merely proof that they can do what they set out to do, and automatically start thinking about what they can focus on next. He smiled, and related a story.

Last week one of his managers had a performance review with an employee. Not surprisingly, performance reviews are a normal and regular part of their business culture. They aren’t avoided, late, skipped or glossed over. They are an expected part of the manager’s job. They, too, have evolved over the years. They are more frequent and more detailed than they used to be.

This employee had been doing a good job. He was dependable, and skilled at his duties. He was an important part of the team, and handled his area of responsibility without problems. None the less, his supervisor had identified a half dozen areas where there was room for improvement. These were listed as goals, with a time frame for their accomplishment.

The employee didn’t object to the content of the goals. He was very unhappy that they existed at all. I’ve done everything you ever asked.” he exclaimed. “I am here every day. I cover all my responsibilities to the letter. I’ve hit every target you’ve ever given me. But you people are never happy. You always want more. I’m tired of it.”

He resigned.

Replacing him wasn’t going to be easy. Training another employee for his responsibilities would take considerable time and effort. The supervisor was faced with a choice between keeping a position covered well, or starting all over with someone new. It wasn’t really a choice. The supervisor informed his manager that the position would be weaker for some time while a new person was brought up to speed. Allowing an employee to opt out of the culture of improvement simply wasn’t an option.

How many of us have the courage to push our employees past “good enough?” How many have given our subordinates the license to tell us that they need to take a step back before they can take two steps forward? In my presentation on “The 7 Sins of an Entrepreneur” we talk about the sin of Sloth as settling for good enough, because the alternative just takes too much effort. Settling for good enough launches a creeping decay in you business. If one employee can hold a position because he or she is just good enough, then why not two? Why not all of them? Eventually you wind up with a company where everything is merely good enough.

The Japanese call it Kaizan, the constant push for improvement. Americans want to take big leaps. We look for giant increases, then fall back until we marshal our strength for another big push. Kaizan is the discipline of looking at everything, all the time, to see how it could be better.

Building a culture where a goal becomes not the finish line but a starting point, takes time and consistency. It isn’t easy but the results, like the progression of the goals themselves, are incredible.

You probably figured this out already, but this company enjoys a level of profitability that most people in their industry would consider impossible to achieve. They, however, consider it a baseline for their next goal.