Growing with Others

Good morning value builders,

Welcome to the Better Business Brief, where I share takeaways from:

running a business I’m building to sell for millions
my consulting with business owners building to sell for millions
tips and tricks you can use to do the same

One of the best ways to grow in business is through partnerships, referrals, and teamwork. I want to talk about how to leverage these a little and share what types of partnerships I’ve found successful.

So today, in less than 5 minutes, I’ll give you:

🤝 How to find your next strategic partner

📖 A book that’ll put you in your place

📈 The key to peaceful, reliable growth

Maybe my strongest types of partnerships are the ones I have with business brokers. I help business owners who want to sell their business, so naturally, knowing a lot of brokers is very useful to me. For a few reasons:

Staying in touch with them keeps me in touch with what buyers of businesses in the market are looking for
They focus on the transaction of business and usually not the consulting work that I do, so there is good reason for them to send someone my way who needs help before selling

Why is this relevant to you? While this is a specific example of a type of partnership that works for me, there are others that work for me too. This is because customers have a buying cycle, or a cycle of needs. I can partner with the types of people that I know they will be working with either before, during, or after they need to work with me.

This is something that can be identified in any industry -

Chiropractors are known for this - they usually partner with lawyers because they know they often work personal injury cases that lead to a need for chiropractic work.

Are you a mental health counseling practice? Partner with primary care physicians or other medical professionals that may come across people who need your help.

The list goes on, but the important thing is specifying this to your industry and what you deliver for customers. Leads are always warmer when referred by someone.

I sat down with one of my broker partners recently and had a conversation about the 5 things that help a business sell in his experience and he shared stories of businesses he’s sold and why they were able to sell. You can watch our top takeaways here:

I’m reading a fantastic new book right now. It’s called Buy Back Your Time. Authored by Dan Martell. He is a founder of multiple businesses that have sold for millions and now manages a private equity like holding company of other companies while doing coaching, consulting, and speaking.

Through all of this crazy experience, he learned how to buy back his time as an entrepreneur, which he asserts is the main thing that has allowed him to get to where he is.

I recommend reading this whole book, because it is fantastic so far, but I want to share my biggest takeaway I’ve gotten from it.

We entrepreneurs typically develop this uncanny ability to deal with highly stressful and chaotic situations. Dan talks about the fact that because we get good at this, we often end up gravitating towards stress and chaos. As crazy as that sounds (because it is), I resonated with it when I heard it. I’ve been through some tough times, and I often find myself looking for problems to solve when there are none.

A couple of the ways he suggests beating this:

Hiring people or partners that can do the things you don’t want to do or suck your energy in your business
Actually letting go and letting them do their job (even if it’s only 70/80% as good as you could’ve done it)

This is really the only way to grow beyond yourself. Partnering with great people to grow your company.

How am I using this personally going forward?

I am striving to seek peace and recharge in times where there isn’t actually a pressing problem I need to solve.
I am looking to take the approach of being a support figure to those I’ve hired or partnered with rather than telling them what to do

Better delegating. Better self care. Better sustainability.