Offboarding Yourself to Scale Your Business and Maximise Freedom with Michele Hecken

Welcome to the podcast that’s dedicated to helping business owners to prepare for exit so you can maximise value and then exit on your terms.

This is the Exit Insights podcast presented by Succession Plus. I’m Darryl Bates-Brownsword and today I’m joined by Michele Hecken. Michele is, I guess, a recovering business owner. She’s exited her business. She’s coined this great term.

She learned how to offboard and herself as a business owner. And now she’s going to share that story because this podcast is all about learning from what other business owners have done and how they exited their business and got the most from their life’s work. So Michele, thank you for joining me today.

Hi Darryl. Thank you so much for having me on your show. It’s pretty cool. You’re in the UK, I’m in Canada, and here we are having a wonderful conversation. I’m honored to be here, Darryl.

Wonderful. Well, it’s definitely not something we could have done when I first started out consulting, I think back then it was even pre Skype. So it would have been a very expensive long distance phone call and it would have been hard to make happen. So Michele, tell us your story. What’s your background? You started your own business. Why don’t you give us a bit of background and we’ll just dig into that and figure out what you learned and how you figured out these off boarding, because I love the term off boarding. I‘ve never heard of off boarding being applied to the actual owners of the business. We normally talk about succession and then exit. So I’m really keen to learn what nuances, what’s different about it and if there is a difference.

Awesome. Okay, that’s a lot to unpack, but I want to start with a segway. That was really cool because you said, you know, several years ago, us, you know, having this call would have been very different and very costly. And that’s exactly what I did when I started my business. I had lived in Germany, so I’m half Canadian, half German, lived in Europe, moved to Alberta, Canada. And what I did with the invention of a fax machine is I served my clients in Europe providing translations for them overnight. So I used the time difference.

I knew I used cutting edge technology, fax machine and yes, very expensive long distance calls. I remember staying up to like twelve or 01:00 at night, not just because of the time difference, but because also it was cheaper to call then. So that’s actually how I started my business. I was like in my early twenties, I had two kids under three when we moved. And I knew nothing about business, nothing really.

I just knew my clients needed translations. Translation market was underserved. It needed to be fast. And it was the opposite of fast because back then, translations were always an afterthought. They still are now.

It’s not so much of an issue now, but back then, if you didn’t plan ahead, everything was urgent. So that’s how I got started, with a fax machine overseas, no clients, new country, knew nothing about business. So yeah, it was a fun start.

And it’s a classic entrepreneurial start, because one of the things we do is we talk to business owners and I’m sure this applies to you how and why they started their business. And there’s 90% of cases, my empirical data research tells me that 90% of cases they’ve either identified a problem that needs to be solved in the marketplace.

So the marketplace, I mean, this problem is an issue for a lot of people. So why don’t I address that and create a business around solving that problem? Or they’ve already got a problem, a solution to a problem, they go, hey, I can provide this solution into a different marketplace. And so with your transferring your changing country, you’ve gone, hang on a sec, I’ve got, I guess effectively a new market and a new problem. The double whammy, just to up the risk a bit.

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what we do it as entrepreneurs. Right? And, and I will tell you, Darryl, everybody thought I was crazy. Like I was, like I said, in my early twenties, new to the country, I had two kids under three.

And I got so much feedback unsolicited that was like, oh, that’s so nice that you’re doing that. You know, you have something little to do on the side. And, and you know, the other thing I heard is unless you speak ten different languages, you can’t be successful in this. Like, you know, the amount of crap people tell you. And for entrepreneurs, it’s, yes, we have to listen to mentors and we have to listen to people, but let’s listen to people who have actually done it instead of people who, you know, really would never have the courage to even step out of their comfort zone.

So, you know, I heard all of it. I heard it’s like, you’re never going to make it. You’re going to be a bad mom. You’re going to be a bad entrepreneur. Your business is going to fail. And I heard all of that. So to your point, I think a lot of entrepreneurs hear this noise from, you know, mostly from people who will not step up and do and take those risks and create something from scratch. Right. So luckily, I ignored it.

Yeah. Look, you just reminded me with the whole, the whole, the feedback in inverted commas. I haven’t sort of thought of that for a long time. But, yeah, as entrepreneurs, we often do get a lot of feedback. And as you point out, it’s always from someone who’s sitting comfortably in their seat or home with the comfort and security of a paid position, and they feel like the transition to owning your own business. Yeah, on paper, it’s real easy. If you understand business, it’s quite easy to do. It’s pretty straightforward. And they seem to forget the part that when you’re living it yourself, life becomes so much more intense just because the stress and pressure of everything you have to do to get all those ducks in a row and I guess moving country and two kids under three

On purpose. Go ahead.

So that’s the business. So that business grew into something significant. By the sounds of it.

Yes. And to go back to your kind of first opening of the conversation about my story and what is off boarding and that, you know, you’d never heard that term.

It’s because I invented it in the meaning of firing yourself from your job and recreating your job description, because we have to let go and reinvent ourselves where that came from. For me, my business was very successful from the get go because I solved that problem. And then very soon I found myself working 20 hours days. I was, you know, ordering food, and I always had a rule. I’d always have dinner with my family and I would always read bedtime stories.

So those were the two things, no matter what that I would always do. But I didn’t really have time to cook. You know, we do the bedtime stories and but I didn’t really spend much time. And I was so burnt out working these 20 hours days that I decided, okay, there’s got to be a better way to do this.

And again, conventional wisdom. Even my business mentors told me, well, you know, you can’t really do both. And I decided I was going to do both and that I was going to have my cake and eat it, too. So I very early on invented. Invented what? I know what I now call the Art of Offboarding. I didn’t call it that then. I didn’t know it was a thing. I didn’t know other people didn’t really do that. I just knew I needed to follow what was right for my life because I wanted to be a good mom and I wanted to run a successful business, and I just needed to find a way to do both.

So I did, and I created this system and I set up my business basically to run without me, because at some point, then later on, I became a single mom. And so I needed to be there for my family. I wanted to be there for my family and also my business. So fast forward to before the sale. I know you’re going to want to dig into that a little bit more. I was working probably four to 10 hours a week for the last 15 years that I owned my business, and it grew faster and it scaled faster. So I’ll leave that dish open for you there, Darryl.

Okay, so I’ve got that. I’m just going to park that for a sec, because what I want to dig into, Michele, is this concept of off boarding, and because it’s something that you slipped in as if it was really easy to do. Yet the reality is so many business owners are stuck on about a million pounds, a million dollars revenue, and you just see a lot of them that have sort of capped out, maxed out there for a number of years.

And it’s often because, what’s that? A million turnover relates to about ten people, in a rough rule of thumb, and ten people, if you think of the span of control for one business owner, they can manage ten people, and everyone has a direct relationship with them, the business owner, which makes them the center of everything. Everything has to go through them. Every decision, every instruction goes through the business owner. They are a key resource in the business.

A linchpin, padlock, bottleneck, call it what you like. How did you realise and how did you grow out of that and pull yourself out of that? Because that’s that lock, if you like. Many business owners get stuck and it forces them into working longer and longer hours, and they can’t see any other solution, so they just halt the business growth there. What did you do? What was the aha moment for you where you realised, I’ve got to do this differently?

Right? Well, to be honest, I was young and I focused on what I needed first for myself and for my family and that basically dictated the course. And just to kind of go back a little bit, we’re always told as entrepreneurs nowadays that we need to work on our business and not in it. Right. But nobody shows you how to do it. Nobody gives you a roadmap. All we hear is you got to delegate more. Okay. And if we go back to your scenario with a million dollar business owner, you’re right.

They’ve created it. They know everything. And they get stuck there because it’s fear of losing control. Like they’ve worked so hard for many years to get to that magical million dollar mark. Right.

And there’s just so much fear of giving. Sorry, I’m so sorry for giving responsibility to somebody else. So then we delegate tasks so that we can keep control. And what we’re doing is we’re keeping our business stuck. So I talk a lot about off boarding versus delegating.

And what that meant for me was I didn’t want to give people tasks. And that’s maybe my personality because it made me nervous, it made me anxious, it made me want to micromanage because it feels great at first. It’s like, oh, I don’t have to do this now. And then you do it again, and then you give somebody else something. And if you have ten people, you know, eventually you’re going to wake up in the middle of the night trying to remember who you gave what to when it’s due, do they have the right instructions?

And you get nervous and guess what? You go in and start micromanaging. So the big difference between offboarding and delegating is when you’re off boarding, you’re taking an intact responsibility and giving ownership and agency to that person. And when people are in that million dollar mark, that’s when I hired my COO and or promoted my COO. And, and again, everybody told me I was crazy.

So back to your question. What did I realise? I realised that it, for me, it was much easier to spend time and train and coach somebody than to keep tabs on everybody kind of, you know, meddling in what, what I was responsible for. And that was the big shift, is letting that go, putting accountability systems in place, but letting people have ownership and agency. And I think that is the crux where most entrepreneurs at that point really get stuck. And I was lucky. Well, let’s call it lucky me. It’s just who I was. I didn’t really have a choice. Scarcity sharpens the mind. I needed to be there for my kids. I needed to find a way to figure this out. And, and, and also, let’s be honest, on the human side, I was too lazy to do all of that stuff myself. I know that sounds awful. And when I tell people I’m lazy, they’re like, you’re not lazy.

Like, the more, you’re the most, most creative, industrious person that I know, it’s like, yeah, because I’m working on all the things that I love, but I. When I’m working on stuff that is not my forte, that I don’t love, I don’t feel good. I feel lazy. So listening to that, when we’re trying to grow our business, that’s the most important thing, because we only have one life. We can have ten businesses, but only one life.

So. And I think Gerber touches on this, and we attribute the working on new business to GerBer and his book, the E Myth, which is the first book I was aware of, of working on your business. Great book. And he says, look, you need to work on your business. You need to systemise.

And I guess it’s around that 1 million mark where you’ve got to start. I call it documenting your business or structuring your business, and, like, up to ten people in your business. You can have a business without structure because everyone comes to you. You don’t need it. It’s all done on relationship.

If you want to go to a million plus, that’s when you need to start recruiting and appointing a management layer as you did. And if you’ve got a management layer, you’ve now got a, I guess, a second pivot point where. Where communications can get lost and misinterpreted. So you need to start documenting. And the best way to start that is with some sort of organisational structure of going, well, Michele does this and Darryl does that, and make sure that you get it all documented. And then job descriptions and getting all of that. Is that kind of the path you followed?

It’s a little bit kind of like that, except what I did. I, and I think that’s a pivotal point when, when I work with clients today that I see over and over again as founders, as owners, as entrepreneurs, we don’t have a job description, so we don’t know, we’re just doing everything right. That that’s what you described.

Everything comes to you and you solve the problems. And let’s be honest, it feels a little bit good. If we have the answers right. I feeds our ego. I mean, it feels great.

Exactly right. And then we say, okay, I need to hire somebody. And when you’re around a million, typically. What do you do? Okay, who do I need?

Do I need an EA, do I need a coo or an integrator or somebody to run the business? And, and when you’re at a million, most people will tell you don’t do that, as my mentors told me not to do that. But I think the path for me that I encourage other entrepreneurs to take when I coach them or when I speak is be clear first, what’s on your plate? Because you don’t have a job description, so you don’t even know what you’re doing. And it’s not just about knowing what you’re doing, it’s knowing whether that gives you energy and you love doing it.

And you also need to know what’s the value of this activity. To my business doing a certain thing, when you have a hundred thousand dollars or pounds in revenue is very different than doing that same thing at a million, because at a million, that same thing that you’re doing may not make any sense for you to do and somebody else could do it better. So taking an inventory of what’s on my plate as the business owner, what do I love doing and what do I not? And what’s the value to the company, what do I absolutely need to keep even if I don’t love it, love it, love it.

Because it’s my responsibility and I need to own it and what is not. And then that becomes the job description for who you need to hire next. And the whole question of does it need to be an EA? Does it need to be a coo? Most entrepreneurs are asking that question way too early.

Let’s see what there is that you can off board. Maybe it’s in a step, maybe you need a part time position. But we just get this idea in our head that to work on the business, we have to immediately hire people. And yes, but randomly hiring people, if you’re not absolutely clear on what your role is, you’re going to hire the wrong people. Then you’re going to step on each other’s toes because that other person has a job description, but you still don’t have one.

And then what? Then you get the crossover. So I think that’s what was really different for me. And I recommend that don’t take canned job descriptions. Look at what you’re doing and look at what the business needs and what you need.

Yeah. One of the things that I’ve seen doing this, Michele, is you’re absolutely right. Most business owners, they, and when they do start writing job descriptions, they create a job description for everyone else in the business but themselves?

Yes.

Okay, so what does that mean? Well, I’m really busy. I’m doing this stuff. Yeah, what you’re doing is you’re fighting fires. That’s why you’re stressed and maxed out, because you haven’t allocated all the tasks in the business and all those things that aren’t allocated, people aren’t doing. So they end up in your lap.

So you end up just chasing your tail, doing everything else, and you’re fighting fires. And because you don’t have a work plan that you’re working to, these things are just ending up in your lap, unplanned, and that’s what’s causing stress. And you happen to work 100 hours a week just to get or try and stay on top of it.

Exactly. Exactly. And the analogy also that I like to use, if we don’t have clarity of what’s causing the stress. Right. If you’re like, like you just described, everybody’s coming to you, you’re putting out fires or whacking moles, just reacting. Did you remember that carnival game where you had to whack the moles and then they just pop up? That’s what it feels like sometimes.

Right. And so when we’re doing that and we’re stressed, and I work with a lot of entrepreneurs that come to me specifically to say, I’m working 80 hours a week, I can’t do this anymore. Right. And the first thing I say, okay, what are you working on? Well, I don’t know. Okay. Why are you stressed? I don’t know. It’s this. It’s this. It’s this. It’s one thing, two things, three things, four things, five things. And they all mesh together in, like, what feels like a ball of wool with many different colors. And then they’re trying to, you know, get this ball of stress out of their system, when really we just need to pull the orange string first, then we pull the blue string. And when we’re trying to solve that problem with a big ball of wool in front of us, what we end up doing is we’re kind of pulling it from the inside and it gets all knotted up.

So we need to have clarity. We need to see the colors in that ball of wool first, which is everything that’s contributing to our stress.

Brilliant. So, Michele, when you started realising that you needed to off board some of the tasks and what a lot of business owners do is they tell me one of the exercises that they’ve had, business coaches help them with you start to track all of the tasks that they’re doing on a week by week basis. Write them down.

So to get the clarity you need to write down the tasks. And when they analysed the tasks, they started to have a look at them all and then they, they figured out what their actually hourly rate was. So if they’re working 80 hours a week and how much money they’re taking out of the business, they just divide one by the other and they can get their actual hourly rate. Not what they think they’re paying themselves.

Yeah.

And then they match the list against their hourly rate and they go, any tasks on this list that I can pay someone less than what I’m paying myself as my hourly rate. They tell me that’s a great way, a great first step of starting to go well, what should I be giving someone else if I, if I’m going to employ someone, if I’m going to get a VA or some sort of person that’s going to help me out, what are the, here’s the list of tasks that I can get hand over delegate as a first point of control because those are lower value tasks than what I’m doing and chances are I don’t like them anyway. There’s a good start, but the thing that’s going through my head is, okay, so we can do that. We might get in a part time marketing person, we’ll get in a bookkeeper, we’ll get some sort of person that will help me, you know, do the admin side of whatever my production capability is, and I’ll grow my business and I’ll get it to about a million pounds or a million dollars in revenue, at which point I need to start employing managers, management level people. And if I’m going to start employing management level people, I’ve kind of hit or entered, you know, what I sometimes refer to as no man’s land.

Because if I’ve got one manager, I’m really not getting the full benefit of having the management team. So if I’m going to go down and go beyond that 1 million mark, I really need to commit to going all the way to around about ten mil, I guess. So by the time I’ve got a business of ten mil, I’ve got a full management team that are fully leveraged, fully optimised, all with teams under them. So I’ve spanned or gone across no man’s land. I’ve now got a full management team or a leadership team with teams under them.

And I, or the leaders can operate fully in that CEO role. So there’s a bit of a commitment that if I’m going to jump in, if I’m going to employ my first manager, if I’m really going to get the benefit and get those profitability and valuation boosts, I really need to go all the way to about that ten mil. Is that the same as your experience? Is that what you went through? Did you, was it conscious or..

Actually, no, I went through something like that very early on, but not really. So I think that, first of all, that approach, sure, it makes sense. It takes way too long to write down your tasks. Weeks over weeks over weeks. There’s a much easier way to get to that.

Secondly, you’re writing down your tasks and now you’re getting a part time marketing person and you’re getting a part time admin. And guess who’s managing all those people? You. Because you haven’t given them responsibility and accountability, where they can just report to you on progress once a week. Okay? Because you still own that responsibility. You’re just getting a little bit of help. But as entrepreneurs, it’s our mindset. I mean, you know, we are. Even if we’re only physically working five or 10 hours a week, we are still always thinking about our business.

And that headspace needs to be free and clear if we’re wanting to really strategically grow our business. And that’s, I think one of the mistakes that a lot of people make is like, I’m going to delegate this to this person and give all these tasks away. But my head space, my mental space is getting smaller and smaller and my mental load is getting heavier and heavier. So now I’m not as effective as a leader because now I’m still managing all the people doing the tasks. And I also wanted to touch on what you said with the calculation.

I do that calculation differently because it’s random. Entrepreneurs pay themselves. Okay? So it’s, and it’s, it’s loaded with a lot of shoulds and beliefs and guilt and, you know, comparisons that are not really necessary. So the way I look at it is, take your revenue, your total revenue, not what you’re paying yourself.

Take your revenue and divide it by the hours you work. And then that gives you a number of what your time is really worth. And basically that’s if you’re operating on a 50% gross margin, just to get a little technical and say you have a $5 million company, don’t double check this math. I’m doing this from, from memory. But if you have a $5 million revenue company, you’re working 60 hours a week, your time is worth, I don’t know, $1600 an hour.

Quick math? Not exactly, but. So now, okay, you can apply that, but that’s not really true. The way I like to look at it is if I’m a $5 million revenue company, then I need to bring at least twice the value of my time to the business for it to just maintain. So if I’m operating on a 50% margin at a $5 million company, and my time is worth by division, $1600, every conversation I have, everything I touch, should bring at least $3,500 in revenue.

And that’s just for breakeven. So if we frame it that way and say, okay, if I want to grow to x, well, then I need to create this value of, say, five or six or seven or $8,000. I mean, I have a client. She has, like, a nine figure business. And you can imagine what that prioritisation looks like.

If they’re going into a meeting with a supplier, well, they need to come out with that value instead of a random value that we’re kind of giving ourselves. So I think the focus on that division that you just said makes it too small. That’s why we end up giving away tasks, because it’s like, okay, if it’s less than $100 an hour, I’m going to give it away. But what we should say, if. If I can’t make $5,000 an hour with my time, on average, then I shouldn’t be doing that. Does that make sense? A bit of a different perspective. Paradigm shift.

Yeah. Look, what I’m hearing, Michele, is that the number one, the business owner needs to be aware of the value of their time and how they figure out that and the context to do it is, I guess there’s a couple of ways to achieve that, but they’ve got to be really aware of the value of their time so that they can be deliberate around where they spend their time.

Exactly. It’s not about the money. It’s about the value. What impact can I make in an hour of my time? Exactly. Love it.

What can I do with the value of my time? And you touched on, and you slipped it in a couple the times now, and you said, look, I was working four to 10 hours a week on my business. So what did you do to free up your time? To allow you to work four to 10 hours on your business and allow the other people that you had employed to get on with their jobs and their roles, and for you to feel that the business was in control because you mentioned, you know, delegate and maintain control. And, and what I took that to mean. And let’s just clarify. It’s not about you being a control freak. It’s about the business processes being in control and not you controlling the tasks and functions, right?

Absolutely. And there are, to me, the biggest role of the leader, the CEO, the entrepreneur, is to build a, build an amazing culture, grow revenue, okay. And expand the business. And the third thing for me is my goal is always to have people working 80% of the time on the things they love. So when we talk about offboarding for entrepreneurs, the same principle can be applied in your teams. Right. So back to how do I not give up control? You’re absolutely right. It’s accountability agency and systems. Okay, so I was very clear on what I’m going to do, what I’m not going to do, and, and that took some time.

I mean, this offboarding system came with a lot of friction and conversations with my COO, wherever she made me aware. It’s like, I thought, I thought I owned that. Why are you asking me about this randomly? I’m like, oh, I’m just checking in. But you’re questioning my decision that makes me feel less confident. Do I own this or do I not? So we had all of these things going on, and because I had an amazing COO who would push back, we figured it out and we said, okay, this isn’t going to work. She said, I need ownership and responsibility. I will give you the accountability. And we were really clear on the outcomes. We shared with the entire company what the KPI’s were. Every single week we would look at, are we on track? Are we off track? Do we need help? So there was always a way to step in. So I would be in a weekly meeting. At the beginning, I was in the weekly huddles. Eventually, I was just in the weekly executive meetings, and my team would lead the huddle. But we had all the data.

I could go in at any time during the day or night, no matter where I was in the world. I could see current revenue, I could see our dashboard. I would know exactly when anything was off. And then I could go back to my COO and say, hey, what’s going on here? But because she saw the same things and we had absolute clarity and uncertainty, and so did the team as to what we were working on and what the direction was, I didn’t have to come to her because she already saw it. So I’d get a text saying, here’s what’s going on with this? I’m on it. Okay. Boom. My mind is clear again.

So it’s systems accountability and also being able to keep control on some things, like my dashboard, also finances. I always knew exactly where we were with our finances, and those are the two big things. If you’re tracking your KPI’s and you know where your money is, those are our leading indicators. You can look at them on a daily basis. You’re going to know something’s off before something’s off.

So is that your secret, Michele, is a good monitoring system that gave you all the right information you needed to know so that you could see if something was drifting off before it became an issue.

Well, so my coo could see if something was drifting off before it became an issue. Yes. But I think more importantly is getting clarity on what that is. You know, the same way entrepreneurs are using job descriptions that are, you know, out of a can or generic.

A lot of them are also using KPI’s that don’t really track what they should be tracking in their particular business. So getting those two things aligned and knowing where we’re going and why that’s important and knowing really what drives, what drives your business. So, for us, it was, it was a gross revenue driven business. So, yeah, we could play with revenue, we could play with gross margin, we could play with net profit. But I looked at it the other way around.

I never really had a. I mean, I. It’s not true. I did have revenue goals, but more importantly, I had bottom line goals, and we worked the other way up because I knew what my numbers were. So, yes, the systems, the numbers, and the absolute clarity on what you’re trying to accomplish and what you’re having your team trying to accomplish.

Yeah. So vision. And you mentioned culture also earlier, and systems and monitoring. Okay, so. So you’ve put all this in place, Michele, looking back now, what do you wish you’d done differently or what do you wish you’d done earlier? Because we go through this journey and we learn along the way. If you were to do it all again, what would you do first or up front or what have you?

That’s a great question. Two things. One is would have, I would have thought bigger. What do I mean by that? I talk a lot about mindset for entrepreneurs and when I work with clients mindset. So I had this number in my head that was as big as I could possibly fathom that I could achieve. And our beliefs hold us back so, so, so much. I remember once having a conversation with a coach.

And he asked me, why are you not a $20 million business now? And I didn’t know the answer. I know it now because that’s what I could not think that big. I didn’t think that was possible. I didn’t.

You know, we all come from different backgrounds, we all have different belief systems, and. And I got exactly my number. And it’s very interesting how the world, or the universe, or whatever you want to call it, works that way. And so going back, I would change. I would work really hard on my mindset to understand that the business, the capability, could be much bigger.

And so for other entrepreneurs who are thinking, I’m going to build it to a million dollars or $10 million, I leave that question out there, why are you stopping there? And I’m by no means saying that only big business is good business. Like, I had two kids, and maybe that’s why I didn’t want to be away, and that was a different path. But if it’s just your holdbacks and your beliefs, question your number and see if it’s really big enough. And the second thing would be holding back on things because you don’t think you can do them without getting all the right information.

So what that means, I could have, ten years ago, done a bunch of acquisitions, but I didn’t because I was scared and I didn’t know how. Right. And that strategy would have brought me a ten x exit or more. So those are the two things, really, you know, focus on your belief systems, and if you think it’s a good path, don’t dismiss it. Thinking, oh, that’s too complicated. Do the research, do the homework, bring in the skills.

Okay? So think bigger. Test your beliefs. Is what I, what I think I heard there as well. And I guess, effectively push yourself and go, why isn’t this bigger? Which is a great basic question. I love the way you’re thinking and you push yourself and you’ve gone, okay, so what I needed is systems. I need to delegate, I need to let the people run it. And I needed good metrics so I could see what was happening.

Michele, out of all the bits and pieces that you have shared with us and given us insight into your off boarding process, for business owners to get them the hell out of the way so that the management team who they’ve recruited and paying good money for can actually do their jobs, what’s the key message that you’d really want listeners and business owners, I guess, who are listening today and listening to this episode, and they’re right at the beginning of their journey, they’re where you were at the beginning. What’s the one thing do you think is the most important thing for them to hear from your experience?

As they’re scaling up or as they’re getting ready to exit? I just want to be clear.

As they’re thinking about, hey, at some point I want to exit my business and I want to be able to do it cleanly and get the most from my life’s work.

Learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. Talk to as many people as you possibly have access to. Don’t believe your own presumptions. If something, you know, if you feel passionate about something, you’re going to find a way from the offboarding point of view is really get clear on what you want your life to look like first.

I wouldn’t have been able to do this if I had let my business drive me. And the goal is to have our business or businesses serve our lives, not the other way around. And so to remember, you’re in control here. You’re in the driving seat. Design what you want, want your life to look like and then build your business or businesses around it.

Look, we all have business plans three, five years in the future, but we don’t have life plans. And all of a sudden we end up and we’re 45, 50, 55, what happened? And I’m at that age now. And luckily, I have no regrets because I did all of the things that I wanted to do. You know, there’s only a finite amount of time.

And I think that’s my, my big heart message is as entrepreneurs, who is better equipped to change the world through our business than we are? Who is better equipped to design their life in the business than we are? But yet we’re working 60, 80 hours a week, burnt out, chasing tasks and not getting the real growth that we want and that we desire and that we deserve. So the one thing, the very one thing is get clear on what you want your life to look like, because you’re not just the entrepreneur and CEO of your business, you’re first and foremost the CEO of your life.

That’s a nice, nice touch of your life. Design your life. So, Michele, you’ve shared a lot of insights today, and you’re doing it yourself. If listeners want to follow up and learn more about Michele Hecken, how do they get in touch?

Well, my website is Michelehecken.com as you can see on the screen, Michele with one L and Darryl, I think my team also sent you just a link to put in the show notes.

I’m whenever I do podcasts or I’m a guest on a podcast, I usually offer listeners to have a quick chat with me, book a time if they want to learn more. So there’s a link in the notes. I’m assuming, Darryl, where you can book a complimentary consultation with me. But this is only going to be live for a little while, so you have access to my calendar. Book some time in is going to be blocked out down the road because I do a lot of podcasts and then I would get to nothing else but talking to everybody.

And as much as I love that, I just don’t have that much time. So yes, visit my website, reach out to me, shoot me an email, book a time. And if you want to hear more about what I have to say about exits, I mean, Darryl, you do such an amazing, amazing job helping businesses prepare for what is, for most entrepreneurs, one of their most important decisions of their career and of their business life, right? So all of the support is there and yeah, so that’s where you can reach me. And I do a very, very tiny, tiny little part of what Darryl and his company, Darryl and his company does.

So I’m grateful that we get to be on this podcast together and share our knowledge to help more entrepreneurs have successful businesses and successful exits.

Thanks Michele. We’ll put all the links so that people can contact you in the show notes and on the website. Really appreciate you sharing your exit insights with us today.

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, Darryl. Always lovely talking to you.