Creating brand value so your business can build to grow—and to exit
This article forms Part 2 of a two-part feature on exit strategies, in collaboration with our good friends at Yield Financial Planning.
“Having an exit strategy is a business strategy”
Aside from creating an advantageous endpoint, one of the most impactful benefits of planning the exit strategy for a business is the creation of a value-driven framework around everything you do. When you build to exit, you also build to grow.
Is it ever too early to think about exit strategies?
Most business owners don’t think about exit strategies when they are building a business. I get it—you’re building a business you love and have no thoughts of leaving it. But, as James McFall, Managing Director of Yield Financial Planning has made clear in his companion piece to this article, Outlining a Business Exit Strategy Plan, if you haven’t thought about exit strategies in advance of your departure, it will likely be difficult to consolidate business value on the fly.
Creating value in your business doesn’t need to be about knowing exactly when or how you will exit your business. It can be difficult to envision a future where you might need to launch the exit plan, especially if you are in good health and love what you do. It might feel like there is no obvious reason to change your services or operations at this stage. After all, you’ll be working in your business for a long time yet.
But, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to dive into a new opportunity if it came up? Maybe in the future, you’ll have a new business idea that you can’t wait to capitalise on, or your exit could come from a threat such as getting sick. Having a business that is worth something to an investor or can be left to a team to manage gives you the freedom to explore the next thing or take a break.
Having an exit strategy is about creating value in a way that gives you options when that time comes. No one knows what the future holds. And the option you take may not be a direct exit — it could be a partnership, an acquisition, or an exciting new opportunity that gives you the impetus to move on.
Thinking about exit strategies early gives you room to move when opportunity comes knocking.
Build to grow: brand value & intangible business assets
So many businesses close with their physical assets (your office furniture, tools, etc.) being the only saleable assets in the business. But imagine if your intellectual, intangible business assets were worth something too?
Focusing on the fact that you might one day sell your business can help you think more deeply about your intangible assets: your services, the talent in your team, your operations, your brand value, and the experience of your clients. Creating value for eventual exit puts you in the mindset of creating business value that can work for you now.
Even if you are a service-based business with highly personalised services, you can still build value in your business through intangible business assets.
As a service designer I work back from that eventual exit—whatever it may look like—and help build brands and businesses that are generating value every single day. The more value you can build into your business now, the more it will be worth when it comes time to move on.
There are various ways to create value from intangible business assets. Here at Studio Clvr, we focus on designing value into four key assets that have proven to be particularly beneficial to our success and the success of our clients:
- Brand value
- Services and products that support growth
- Operational efficiency
- Client experience
All of these assets have a solid digital focus, because studies have shown that in this post-COVID world, if you aren’t going digital, you’re falling behind. It’s easy for traditional services in the professional realm to feel exempt from this idea, but according to PWC, it’s time to get on board!
1. Brand value
When thinking about an exit strategy and your brand, it can be difficult to detach your business if it is built around a personal brand. But if you have a name on the door that is not your own, then building brand awareness can not only build authority in your field, but can also help with creating business value overall.
Your branding needs to shout to the world who you really are, be recognised in a heartbeat and connect with your clients to generate trust, loyalty and sales. Now, it’s easy to forget, but your brand is about so much more than just how cool your logo is. Your brand is the consistently recognisable style you use across all of your marketing materials. It’s the tone of voice you use that makes it easy for your clients to feel that you ‘get’ them. And it’s the experience your clients have when they work with you.
Brand identity and brand awareness
Getting your brand identity right is one of the best investments you can make and one that has lasting impact over every touch point of your business. It’s the one business investment for which return on investment keeps giving and giving. Because you use it literally everywhere.
Having a strong brand identity that connects your audience with your business can help your business survive beyond your direct involvement in the company.
Pushing your identity out into the world using a solid brand strategy goes a long way towards building brand awareness and building brand value [link to brand value article]. This includes carefully thought-through content that is a gateway to what you’re all about so that potential clients (and partners and investors) can gain an understanding of who you are and be more likely to jump when the time is right because they have had the chance to get to know you, like you and trust you as you introduce them into your world.
Customer loyalty
Providing a great customer experience can improve customer loyalty. Repeat customers are a great indicator of the value of your business. I’ll talk more about this as a standalone point, but the customer experience is integral to brand value.
If the experience a client has, once they have signed up to your service, does not match the experience you are selling as part of your brand strategy, this will likely negatively impact your reputation and the value of your business.
Reputation
It goes without saying that the reputation of your business is intricately linked to the reputation of your brand. The reputation your business earns through the quality of your services and the satisfaction of your clients reflects on your brand identity and can be leveraged as a key aspect of who you are.
One way to showcase your reputation is by capturing reviews. Have a process in place for capturing reviews and testimonials to make it easy for your happy customers to rave about how you have helped them.
2. Creating value with services and products that support growth
Who values most from one-to-one services?
Most consultants and service-based businesses start by offer highly custom one-to-one services specific to each client. It is worth remembering that every one-to-one interaction you have, while valuable and bespoke to the client, is unlikely to be valuable as an intangible asset that can be assessed when selling your business.
As a consultant myself, I understand how hard it can be to shift your thinking away from the value of what you do as a personalised service specific to each individual client. I get that, and I’ve been there myself. And I am not for a moment dismissing the value that you add to your services, I know for many of us, it is this custom offering that underpins reputation. However, that reputation built from your direct involvement with your clients does not add value to your business. Nor does it foster an environment for growth.
Build to grow by packaging services
There is a balance to be struck here. Your expertise can still be provided as a valuable asset to each individual client, while simultaneously creating value for your business. A really effective way to achieve this is by designing your services in a way that makes them more valuable — productized services, rather than custom contracts with every client.
Hear me out on this: do you have any products or services that can bring in revenue without your involvement? Reducing your personal input in your services does not need to change the value of your offering. By productizing services, you can create products that reduce your one-to-one interactions, while still maintaining a high level of value for your clients.
There are several ways of doing this, depending on the price point of your service, but at all levels, the main idea is to reduce the need for custom quoting (this also saves a ton of time), by designing reliable frameworks around each service to improve efficiency and create a higher level of quality control and predictable outcomes for you, your team and your clients.
Remember that the focus here is on building intangible business assets. Every one-to-one interaction you have, while valuable, is unlikely to be creating value, nor will it be a build-to-grow model that allows your business to scale.
Read more about productized service models that may suit your business.
3. Operational efficiency
Have you ever thought about just how much time you spend on all of the in-between tasks that you do over and over again?
The three pillars of our framework are Build, Simplify and Leverage. All of these are key to creating value and an asset-worthy level of operational efficiency.
Our website design services are built on the same foundational framework as the services we design for our clients. Creating value is about designing systems that eliminate as much effort as possible, starting with the front door to any business operating in 2022 — your website.
On-boarding, transactional communication and off-boarding
Automating the customer journey can reduce the admin load in your business and free up your time. With clever web design services, automation can be incorporated into your website so that communication is automated from the first point of contact that a lead makes in their journey to getting to know you.
Automated lead nurturing is a great way to build a relationship with a lead and help to qualify them, meaning that when you do have one-to-one time, it is time well spent and with a higher rate of conversion as the lead has already been warmed up by your automated process.
Beyond lead nurturing, transactional communication can be automated and streamlined to onboard clients to your systems and welcome them into your community. Status or milestone-based communication can be automated to help the client feel well looked after, without you needing to write an individual email. And clients can be off-boarded from major projects in a way that introduces them to your other services and strengthens client loyalty, increasing customer lifetime value and the value of your client list.
Standard operating procedures (SOPs)
I have a background in the development of workflows and operational efficiency from the old days, when I worked inhouse for a global magazine publisher. Back when I did the branding for Yield, James McFall, Director of Yield Financial Planning (the other half of this exit strategies collaboration), bought me a copy of The eMyth Revisited as a gift. The key messages from that book ring true today, even though the book itself is getting on in years (aren’t we all!). Reading eMyth reconfigured my knowledge of processes and SOPs in a way that I was readily able to apply to ‘work on my business’ and to help my clients do the same.
SOPs are elemental not only to Studio Clvr business operations, but to the framework we use when helping clients articulate their clever and build business value online.
Even if you have SOPs already in place, it can be worthwhile to do a regular audit to iterate on what is and isn’t working to streamline your operations. Mapping your workflows and your client journeys is a great way to start, then gradually add the SOP for each stage of the workflow. Having efficient processes can massively reduce the amount of input you need to have in the day-to-day running of your business, and is the first step to identifying opportunities to create value in your services and in your workflow.
If you think some of your services could be managed by employees, then it’s vital that you have SOPs in place. This doesn’t only benefit your clients with a consistent final result; it also maximises the performance of your staff (and gives you peace of mind).
Build to grow with automated systems
A big part of creating value through operational efficiency is leveraging technology to make operating an online consultancy easier. From your website, to your email marketing software, to your CRM or project management tools, all of these provide many benefits not only in doing the jobs that they are made for, but also in automating processes within those tools to take admin off your desk and make life generally a whole lot easier.
It’s easy to automate communications, so that’s always a good starting point, but what about a service? Is there a service you offer now that could be partially or completely automated? Think about ways you can digitise a service or the workflow around a service so that it takes less (or no) input from you to deliver it, or so that it can be done by somebody else.
Automating (even partial automation combined with manual processes) can build business value in the following ways:
- Eliminate the need for software experts to manage a specific task, making it easier for anyone in the business to use the tools.
- Automating tasks saves a huge chunk of time daily, increasing efficiency and productivity.
- Quality control is improved due to the reliability of a standardised process.
- Customer experience is through the roof because they only just signed up and everything feels so under control.
- Tasks are moving forward without the need for your physical presence.
4. Client experience
Customer experience is integral to good service design and increases client loyalty and lifetime value of the customer. The client experience is about more than the one-to-one interactions any individual has with you or a team member. Maintaining a great client relationship goes without saying. If you want to build to grow, value can be added to the client relationship by enhancing the client experience in a whole lot of ways beyond your one-to-ones.
We have identified 3 levers that can add value by creating an outstanding customer experience:
Communication
I’ve outlined above all the ways that a considered onboarding, offboarding and transactional communication flow can make the client feel well looked after. Automating part or all of these touchpoints—which might even include automating the postage of handwritten cards of gifts—can be an easy value-add that is completely systematised.
Having a marketing plan that attracts new clients, while also keeping existing clients loyal is another huge part of value building that doesn’t have to be manual every step of the way. We have loads of hacks up our sleeves for repurposing content and leveraging what you have both in terms of resources and tools to build value to grow with minimum effort.
Enable better digital experiences
Have you been on a website recently that just didn’t work the way you thought it would? Or a website that was way too hard to navigate? Look at your website and your client portal (if you have one) through a new lens and consider the digital experience your clients have when they interact with your business online. Is the experience a pleasant one? Could it be better? Is the client guided through your website in a logical flow that corresponds with the journey you want them to take?
We all expect to be able to do things at a time that suits us. For example, I don’t want to wait for a business to be open to be able to schedule an appointment. I expect to be able to schedule, reschedule or cancel an appointment 24/7. The demand for customer-empowered experiences is increasing, so empower your clients to do simple tasks in a more efficient way that creates value and gives you more time to spend doing higher-value tasks.
Customer experience strategies
Plan the experience you want your clients to have when they work with you and work back from that vision to map it out for every step of the client journey. Gather feedback, audit and iterate regularly to ensure that the client experience meets (and exceeds) the expectations set by the promises made in your branding and marketing strategies.
Are you creating value in your business every day?
How you operate your business right now in your day-to-day affects your ultimate exit. The best part of designing your business for exit long before exit needs to be on your mind, is that the process of building your intangible business assets directly impacts on your short-term goals, as well as that long term strategy.
Re-evaluating your business through the lens of rebranding or building a new website is a great opportunity to build value in your business in a way that works towards an exit strategy, even if you’re not sure what your exit would look like right now.
If you’re looking to rebrand your business or build a new website to articulate your business value at the heart of your digital foundations, get in touch to find out how the Studio Clvr team can help you find your clever.
For the financial perspective on creating value for an eventual exit, read Part 1 of this two-part collaboration with Yield Financial Planning here: Outlining a Business Exit Strategy Plan.
