Written By: Karen Deis
What if something happened to you tomorrow? What if someone made you a job offer you couldn’t refuse? What if you decided it’s time to retire? Or just can’t take it any more?
Ask yourself these questions:
Does your "book of business" have any value?
Do you really have anything to sell?
I can assure you that it DOES have value — or it will - if you start to develop an exit strategy right now!
So what makes your business valuable and what’s a good exit strategy?
First, let me begin with my very personal story about selling my mortgage company…
After being a loan officer for 18 years, my sister Becky and I decided to start our own mortgage company. Becky and I were the perfect match. Her previous jobs included selling office equipment to large companies—moving on to selling accounting software and ultimately was hired by a major accounting firm to show accountants how to use the software and automate their accounts. Her expertise was in administration and mine was sales.
After 3 years into starting the first successful mortgage broker company in our area, Becky was diagnosed with Stage 3 Breast Cancer and her prognosis was about 6 months to live.
After the initial shock and grief, we had a heart-to-heart on what is the “value” of our little operation and what would we have to do to create an exit strategy!
Becky did live for another 7 years and passed on in 2002, but the moral of the story is that we did sell our business—and for lot of money.
This article is about what we did and a compilation of what other loan officers have done to create an exit strategy! By the way, when Tim Braheem started Loan Tool Box, he told me from the very start—that he already had an exit strategy in place to sell it somewhere down the road! Do you?
