406: Making Your Business Sellable (Even If You Never Plan to Sell)

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. Today, I'll share how I've been preparing PodScan, and long before that, another SaaS business, to be ready to be acquired at a moment's notice. This episode is sponsored by paddle.com, my merchant of record payment provider of choice, and they've been helping me focus on POTSScan from day one. It's been really helpful. They've been taking care of all things related to money so that founders like you and me can focus on the things that only we can build. And Paddle handles all the rest, sales tax, credit cards failing, all of that. Highly recommended. It keeps your books clean. It makes it very easy to communicate these internal financial things as well. So please check out powell.com. Here's something that I've learned building and selling software as a service businesses in the past. A well run business is a sellable business. And, usually, a sellable business is also a well run business. There's kind of an equivalence here. And while a lot of founders have these grand expectations of gigantic exits, right? We all hope to sell for millions and millions. The real value of a business lies in something much simpler. Business that is well structured and operates following procedures and structured plans. And that structure alone is what makes a business valuable. Of course, there's more to this, right, as market says, customers, but the structure is a signal. And why? Well, because a business that runs well is sellable because it's easily transferred. An acquirer looks at your business and they think, can I take it over easily? Can I put my own people in? And if they can, then it is a business that they're looking into maybe acquiring. So today, I wanna share what I have done with PodScan to make this business as efficient as possible. So that whatever might come, whether it's an extensive partnership or an acquisition or some deeper integration with another project, I am prepared. More importantly, the value capturing of the business can continue regardless of who's at the helm. That's also very important to me. There is this book by Michael E. Gerber, the E Myth, the entrepreneurial myth. And in this book, he describes on how to structure a business. And one of the ideas of a well run business, a well run system of entrepreneurship is to make yourself replaceable. So I don't necessarily want to replace myself at this point, but I want to be able to make that choice easily if I ever have to or want to in the future. So I can already start preparing the business to do this. So over the last couple of months, I think I've talked quite a bit about the technical optimizations in the business, all the tech stuff, all the transcription stuff. And for software business, the true value lies in learning about all kinds of challenges and making solutions to those particular …