What do I need to do over the next 2 years?

Getting ready to sell my business

In order to sell my course business which has been built around a personal brand I need to accomplish the following…

• Remove myself from customer support

• Simplify and document all business processes

• Prove that we can use other people to create course content AND marketing content

• Increase profit each year (the aim is to roughly double profit each year)

Why do I need to remove myself from customer support?

Removing myself from customer support is the only logical first step. Not only does it free up my time to work on the rest of the goals but it also proves to a potential acquirer that I am not the most important person in the business at all.

Currently I have a great virtual assistant who deals with almost all of my customer support BUT she was recently very ill and hospitalised for two weeks. Thankfully she is doing better now and is out of hospital, however I had to step in for two weeks and deal with customer support. This showed me two things. Firstly, that we have a single point of failure. Secondly, there are no contingencies in the business that don’t rely on me stepping in to cover people.

Simplifying and Documenting all business processes

I started my teaching business in 2010 and since then it has evolved from being an in-person music lesson business to being an online-only course business with one-off courses and subscription based services. Every time I’ve grown, wanted to add new features or faced an issue I have simply tacked on a new piece of tech, process or system. It’s messy! I think this is known as a tech debt.

Over the next two years I will go through all the old systems, processes and tech and decide whether they can be simplified, improved or removed. All the while I need to make sure that they are being carefully documented and that SOPs are being created so that anyone could slot in to manage them.

I don’t even remember half of the things that are going on in the background.

Proving that we can use other people

When I moved into online course businesses I was excited about all of the “Passive Income” I was going to make by creating my “muse” as inspired by reading Tim Ferriss’ “4 Hour Work Week”. I had no desire to ever build a business to exit. Instead I wanted something that would satisfy my desire to grow my music career and personal brand while affording me time freedom to do all the things that were important to me.

As a result of this I have built a business with my name in the company name and a marketing funnel built around my personal brand.

Obviously I can’t sell myself to anyone who buys the business AND I don’t want to have some lengthy “earn-out” to get what I think the business is worth. So, I need to prove that other people can be the face of the courses.

This will involve using other teachers to be the face of marketing material and to create new course material that we can sell.

I already have a team of three teachers as well as a large group of guest teachers who contribute to the school. Students get regular feedback from their teacher (not me) and I’ve proven that I can sell courses created by other teachers.

I just need to do more and gradually move away from being the only face of the school.

I’m imagining kick-back from current students as I become less and less “visible” BUT I have to accept that this will be necessary if I want to sell the business.

Doubling profit each year

Since having my first child in 2020 my profit and turnover has remained stable. The business provides me with more than I need and I don’t need to spend insane amounts of time on it each week for it to do so. This is great if I want to keep the business for ever BUT if I want to sell it then I have to demonstrate that it can grow and that it can keep growing year over year otherwise it is only worth a small multiple of the current profit.

I plan to get a very good grip on all of my important metrics such as cost of acquisition, average lifetime value and everything else that will help me to discern how much I can invest in acquiring a student.

But STEP 1 is removing myself from customer support and ensuring that we have contingencies in place in case of illness etc.

I still don’t want to work after 1pm each week day because I want to spend all the time I can with my family before my eldest starts school in August.