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In this episode, Drew talks about six things you can do to maximize your company's valuations. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Prefer to read rather than listen? the text transcribe from this episode. Highlights Six tips to maximize your valuation How to decide on your story Tips for minimizing risk Diversifying your traffic sources Getting your company on autopilot How to network for selling Links/ Resources: Built to Sell, John Warrillow, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber IRCE Shop.org Flippa Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you can and I will send it to you as a PDF. Read The Transcript: Drew Sanocki: Hey everybody. Welcome to the Nerd Marketing podcast. This is Drew Sanocki. We're talking about investments in private companies. We're talking about maximizing your valuation in this episode. I think it's a really important episode for that reason. Everybody wants to maximize your valuation, whether you're raising money ... If you raise money, if you're going to raise a couple million bucks, you want to do it at a higher valuation so you give away less of your company. Obviously, if you're going to sell your company, you want to maximize that valuation so you can get more money in your pocket. This isn't the typical maximize your valuation list that you'll see on a number of brokerage sites. Just Google it. You'll find plenty. This is my take, based on ten or so years in the game, on the things that I see, in particular around direct to consumer brands, and SaaS brands. Really, I've tried to distill it down to six tips, six things you want to do to maximize your valuation. Drum roll please. Number one. I would say decide on your story. What I mean by that is are you going to raise money or sell off of a growth story, or a profitability story? I'll give you an example. Karmaloop. When we acquired the assets of that business, it was probably ... They couldn't tell a growth story because the company was in bankruptcy. It was a declining asset. They're in bankruptcy. You can't tell a growth story. They couldn't also tell a profitability story, because they were in bankruptcy. You put those two things together, and the business fetches a much smaller valuation. So assuming you could do one or the other, try to decide now if you are going to be selling a growth story in a couple years, or selling that profitability story, because it's going to dictate what you do, and decisions around your business. If you are going to sell the growth story, you want to put as much of your profits back in the business, step on the gas, run Facebook ad campaigns at a lower return on ad spend. Whatever it is, you want to sell that growth story, so you want to lower your profitability, and always favor growth at the expense of profits. On the flip side, you're going to sell a profitability story, you want to do what you can to maximize the profitability of the business, like your target return on ad spend goes from two to ten, or something, to just generate as many profits as you can. The growth story and the profitability story determine very different kinds of buyers, and very different multiples, as we discussed multiples in the last episode. If you are growing, and you choose that growth story to tell, you sell that in your deal book. Then, you could also argue that you get valued off of multiple of revenue. Conversely, if you're on board with the profitability story, you want to maximize that owner's discretionary cash flow, because that's the thing that's going to drive the multiple of the business, and the ultimate valuation. So, I'd say, number one, decide on what story you want to tell. Number two, you want to reduce risk in the business. We talked about how valuations go from nothing for the smallest, riskiest businesses, all the way up to the public equity markets,