Episode 667 | Increase Your Exit Price by Decoupling Yourself from Your Business with John Warrillow

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2023

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In episode 667, Rob Walling speaks with John Warrillow, author of Built to Sell, about validating and launching his second SaaS business, VidGuide. They cover how Standard Operating Procedures can help your business, from leading toward better exits to easing your burden as a founder. Topics we cover: 2:59 – Why John decided to launch VidGuide 7:23 – Validating and positioning a “scratch-your-own-itch” SaaS idea 13:45 – Considerations for novel software solutions 18:27 – Success stories of others and their SOPs 22:42 – John’s early validation for VidGuide 26:13 – Following April Dunford’s methodology for positioning Links from the Show: John Warrillow (@JohnWarrillow) I Twitter Built To Sell by John Warrillow The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow The Art of Selling Your Business by John Warrillow The ValueBuilder System Built to Sell Radio VidGuide Episode 532 | The Art of Selling Your Business with John Warrillow Episode 603 | Bootstrapping HotJar to $40M ARR Using D2C Marketing Episode 492 | From Zero to $55k MRR to Exit (in 2 Years) with Feedback Panda Ten Year Career by Jodie Cook MicroConf Refresh Episode 60: How to Craft a Story that Sells with April Dunford If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to startups with the rest of us. I'm Rob Walling, and in this week's episode,
0:04.2	I talk with John Warlow, the author of Built to Sell, The Automatic Customer, and the Art of
0:10.9	Selling Your Business. John also runs a very successful SaaS company called Value Builder that
0:17.4	is aimed at business advisors and brokers.
0:23.1	In my experience of this business world,
0:25.8	John is one of the most knowledgeable people about real business exits.
0:28.7	This is not Instagram selling for a billion dollars in a weekend.
0:32.3	This is about software companies, agencies, manufacturing companies,
0:39.5	e-commerce, just the thousands or hundreds of thousands of exits that are below the radar that are not on the front of TechCrunch
0:45.0	and that are businesses that sometimes sell for multiples of EBITA or in the case of SaaS,
0:50.4	often sells for multiple of revenue, but these are not 100x revenue. These are those
0:55.8	realistic business exits. And John has interviewed hundreds of founders over on Built to
1:00.6	sell radio if you're interested in hearing more about that. But today, he and I dive in how to decouple
1:06.6	yourself from your business by creating standard operating procedures. And I know you've heard this
1:12.5	before. You should create SOPs. We know. So we go a little bit into why and how that can increase
1:17.5	your exit multiple, but also how it can reduce your earn out if you do decide to sell your company
1:22.6	and how it can make your job as a founder easier while you're running the company. And so we don't
1:27.7	just talk about theory, though. We actually talk about this tool that he and his team have developed
1:31.4	through a lot of iteration and a lot of customer conversations. It's called vid guide at vidgide.com.
1:38.1	And they've taken a really novel tact on it, not only how to create SOPs, but how to get your
1:43.8	team to consume them.
1:45.2	And so we dive into that topic for the next 30 or so minutes.
	...

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