Herman School of Business
What's Your Exit Strategy?
People want to know how you can move from one place in life to another, from owning a gas station to running a computer school, from selling automotive products franchises to buying and selling huge manufacturing companies. It starts with something most people do not have in their daily lives…an exit strategy.
For me everything I do has an exit strategy. How do you function without one?
How do you know you are “there” if you never set out where “there” is? What makes it easy to move out of something is knowing one of two things; either you are “there” or you are never going to get “there.” As a child I played baseball religiously hoping to make it to the majors; but, hitting about .200 in the Junior Leagues convinced me it was never going to happen, so I moved on. Didn’t you have fantasy jobs as a child? How did you let go of them?
Maybe people just can’t identify their exit strategy, since they don’t look at the data in a circumstance, or think about where “there” was going to be and it keeps them stuck in something that drags on-and-on in their life, instead of letting them move on. For some people to accept change you almost have to drive over them with a truck because they never thought about something being over, or not working out.
Let’s say as a twenty-something you want to have a job you love that makes more than one hundred thousand dollars. That person may have to take a series of jobs to learn how to sell in situations for far less than your money goal. But as you reach the top of the ladder in the smaller paying job, the next level of money is open to you. So taking a job with a fifty thousand dollar goal requires an exit strategy…get to the top and move up another level. If you open a candy store expecting to be a millionaire my bet is your exit with this failed strategy will be that you go broke…because you could never get “there” from one candy shop.
Exit strategies are critical for success. But don’t confuse having an exit strategy with short term goals. I took jobs and bought companies that I knew were going to be “short term” with the exit strategy to move up another notch. Once I founded a company (Equity Partners, Inc) that met all of my lifetime goals for income, was extremely challenging on a high level, and still let me control many aspects of what I did from day-to-day…I stayed there almost twenty years. My exit strategy was to keep it going as long as I wanted to work, and then sell it for enough money to carry me forward another five years. And that is exactly what happened.
What is your exit strategy?
- Posted: 24 November 2008
- Comments: 0
- Category: Business success
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