I hated my business.

I was overworked, exhausted, and finally had enough.

Done with it.

Done with picking up and dropping off supplies between job sites.

Done with driving across the city to be the fastest to give quotes to new prospects. And done with ending my day only when stores were closed and it was too late to go to customers' houses. 

Physically drained after a 15 hour day, I'd come home at 10pm and pray there was something ready-to-eat (and still edible) in the mini-fridge to give me sustenance.

With whatever energy I had left, I threw myself at my laptop and reluctantly started replying to emails I missed from the day in an attempt to keep up some form of reasonable customer service response times.

By the time I was at "inbox zero" (or as much as I could manage before dozing off), I'd crash out between 1 or 2am, sometimes still wearing the same shirt saturated with sweat and sawdust from earlier that day.

It's highly unlikely I rolled over even once in the night, partly from my depleted body's exhaustion, but more accurately because there was no room to rollover on the couch where I slept at my buddy's apartment.

Only get up and do it all over again the next day. Only the higher powers know how I didn't sleep through my morning alarm clock buzzer.

By some miracle, I lived less than 10 minutes away from the supply store, so I could roll off the couch and make it by 7am store opening before the lineups were too long.

Notably, there was not enough time for the bags under my tired eyes to clear out. 

And this was how I existed in the early years of my business.

Until I had finally had enough.

So I pulled into the parking lot of the local business brokerage feeling complete relief.

Relief that I had found my escape from the business I had built.

And hated.

Only there was no relief.

Because I didn’t have a real business.

Systems were lacking.

A buyer wouldn’t be able to expect the same results I got.

And if they did, they’d have to work as much as I did doing tasks and roles that a business owner shouldn’t be doing.

...which no buyer would in their right mind do.

The only chance at selling would be a competitor buying my customer list and equipment to gain more market share.   

I wanted to feel relief.

And instead I felt defeated.

Defeated that I had built what I thought was a business that I could not sell.

But this tough truth was exactly what I needed to hear to make some serious decisions. 

It was the catalyst that got me thinking differently about my business and my role in it. It made me realize that my business is an asset that I own.

And my most important job as a business owner was to make that asset more valuable. I needed to build business systems. And the results had to be transferable to another buyer.

It didn’t happen overnight, but from that moment on, every decision in my business had to run through the filter of:

“Does this make my business more valuable?”

And a few short years later, I had created a valuable, transferable, desirable asset of my business. 

Then something strange happened.

Looking back, it’s incredibly obvious. But I didn’t realize it until it already happened.

I put in all that effort, spent years building up, and pulled the levers that yielded the most business value.

And it was all for the idea of being able to drive back to the broker in town to show what I had done.

To finally sell.

And now that I had exitability available to me… 

I didn’t want to sell anymore.