💵 How to Increase the Value of Your Business...

Once you’re going and growing, something that always comes up is: Where is this going?

Do you want to list, sell or build an ever-growing stable group of companies?

Either way, at some point, you’re going to want to know how to increase your value…

There are several ways to deliver a big payday for shareholders. The one the startup world is probably most familiar with is the growth-focussed “winner-takes-all” method. Where you build out a new idea, raise a ton of VC money and try to grow as big as you can, as fast as you can, to dominate the market and then list on the stock market to create liquidity for the shareholders.

But that doesn’t always work in SA, though. We have a smaller market and thus it’s not always possible to reach profitability at scale.

So another more sensible approach is to build for profitability as fast as possible and leverage that success to build an even bigger business in that specific sector.

Here’s how that works…

The consolidation play

1. Build for profitability

The goal isn’t necessarily to become big early on, but rather as stable as possible. Prove the business model and the unit economics. This often means prioritising optimisation and streamlining the business over growth. You want to understand the dynamics well and also start building up some cash — you will need both later.

2. Build a strong team

It’s vital to build a company that can eventually run by itself – without too much of you as the founder’s interference. And the easiest way to achieve that is to have all the right staff in all the right places so that if you, as the founder, step out, it doesn’t really affect the business’s ability to earn. This will free up your time to focus on doing the deals later which will make this go big!

3. IP or Proprietary processes

It’s a tough one because you can’t always own IP, copyright or trademark, but it really makes a big difference if you have something – a process, system, method or technology — that’s clearly identifiable as your own. This could be vital for helping you do number 4…

4. Buy out others to augment your offering in the same sector

There are often major opportunities in consolidating smaller businesses into a larger company. This brings about scale benefits which unlocks bigger margins.

The thinking around this in the startup space would be: if you’ve developed some tech/IP that helps you do business better/faster/cheaper – whatever – than the other guys, there should be some “traditional businesses” or competitors who will eventually be struggling more than you.

And the idea is to use your success (or this is even a good reason to raise some funding) to go and buy them out – competitors, suppliers and other companies in the same space. So you can take whatever customers they have, optimise it as much as possible and assemble a group that’s perceptibly more valuable.

There’s even a formula for these kinds of buyouts:

• Only offer to put up a percentage (say 10%) of the business’s purchase price upfront.
• Then to do a leveraged buyout deal – you take the assets of the business you’re buying and put them up as collateral for a loan to buy it (asset finance).
• You could even create a deferred payment deal with the seller – where you agree to pay them off over time instead of all at once.
• And then you pay back the loan or the deferred payments with the money the business you’ve just bought makes – hopefully, combining it with your business you can optimise it enough to have it pay for itself very quickly.

So effectively you use a little bit of cash, but mostly your track record and future vision to buy entire companies.