EP233: John Warrillow - How To Sell Your Bookkeeping Business

Michael Palmer: So, let's imagine you built this practice up and it now, if you do the math, may be worth 60%, 70%, 80% of your net worth. Well, none of us would ever deal with or permit our investment broker to put 80% of our assets into one stock, right? But essentially, that's what you've done. When you build a business that's successful, it becomes a huge part of your net worth. You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back to the Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a terrific one. Our guest is the founder of the Value Builder System and a bestselling author of a few books, including Built to Sell. Plus, he has a new book coming out, The Art of Selling Your Business: Winning Strategies and Secret Hacks for Exiting on Top. John Worlow, welcome back to the podcast. Hey, thanks, Michael. Good to be back. It's great to have you. And it has been a while. You were on the show a few years ago. We talked about Building Your Business to Sell, Built to Sell, which I absolutely love that book. And listener, if you have not read that book, it's one of my favorites. And we're going to talk a little bit about that today. But the world has changed a lot since we last chatted. So I'd love to know how you're doing and what, what have you been up to since then?

John Warrillow: Well, it has changed a lot. You know, we're recording this, I guess, the beginning of 2021. And, you You know, COVID has sent everybody into a bit of a tailspin and it's been a, it's been a big, a big, big change for a lot of business owners. We've just done some research that actually we just published. So it's kind of timely. It's on my mind about the impact COVID has had on business owners' attitudes. So you mentioned Value Builder where we have a questionnaire people take when they start with us and we compare to contrast people who took the questionnaire prior to the announcement of COVID and during COVID And the, the two big differences that COVID has seemed to have has impacted business owners is number one, they have— business owners are now much more interested in selling to a third party as opposed to