Entrepreneurs Need To STOP SAYING This One Line
Updated on April 25, 2025
Transcript
I still have more juice left to squeeze before I sell my business. If you've ever thought this, you're making a critical mistake that could cost you literally millions of dollars. Today, I'm going to show you why the perfect time to sell isn't what you think and why understanding this concept could be the difference between a life-changing exit and leaving money on the table.
The truth is, most entrepreneurs get this completely wrong, and it's costing them dearly when it comes time to sell. Most entrepreneurs think, “I need to grow my business to its absolute peak before selling. I should max out my revenue, optimize everything, and then cash out at the very top.” And hey, it makes intuitive sense, right? Higher numbers, higher sales price—what's not to like? But the issue is, this approach completely misunderstands what buyers are actually looking for.
Buyers aren't just purchasing your current revenue; they're buying future potential. When they look at your business, they're asking one crucial question: What can I turn this into? If you've already maxed out all the obvious growth avenues in your business, you've actually made your business less attractive, not more.
I'm good friends with a very famous person in the Internet marketing world. Pretty much everyone knows them, and I’ve helped sell several of their businesses. You’d think a buyer like this, looking at a seller like that, would drool to acquire something that this person has built. But let me tell you, it was hell. It was not a fun time from a broker perspective every time this famous person sold a business with us.
You might be asking, “Well, why is that?” Well, it's because this person was so damn good at optimizing every little inch of the asset that he was trying to sell before selling it. Even our most qualified buyers—the people who really understood the niche, understood the marketing strategy behind the asset—were left kind of scratching their heads and thinking, “I don't know what to do with this. Like, I honestly don't know how to make this business better.” And because of that, it was a struggle to sell those businesses.
If your goal is to sell a business for an absolute life-changing amount of money, ironically, being “better” is not always, well, better. See, every business as they grow, they naturally follow what is called an S curve. The S curve is where growth starts slow—often painfully so, as anyone who knows starting a new business can attest. And then, as that growth starts snowballing, it accelerates rapidly and eventually plateaus.
When most owners decide to sell, it's usually for one of two reasons, and it does relate to this S curve graph. The first reason: they're just getting started and realize entrepreneurship isn't for them, or this business isn't for them. So usually, they're going to be at the bottom of the S curve. The problem with selling at the bottom is that you will not realize the benefits of all the hard work you've done yet. In fact, the buyer is going to reap the vast majority of the fruits of your labor. Because you're so early on the S curve, a lot of times a buyer won't even buy you because they might think, “Hey, this is such a small startup—so early—that it would be easier for me to just go and do it myself.” So you run into that issue pretty big if you sell too early.
Now, the other end of the spectrum is the core of what I'm talking about in this video, where you've hit a plateau and what you consider to be the summit of your climax is actually a valley of stagnation. That summit of your potential is the buyer's valley of stagnation. And both are terrible times to sell. Selling at the bottom means you haven't proven the business model, at least not very much, and selling at the top means the buyer sees limited upside potential, which means they are also going to give you a limited offer when it comes to buying the business.
But don't worry, there is a sweet spot, and it also exists on the S curve. I've actually talked about it a few times on this channel, but it bears repeating because I hear this line all the time about “how much juice there's left to squeeze.” So, when your business is clearly growing and has proven product-market fit, but it still has obvious room to expand, this is when buyers get very excited. This is when you can exit that business at a premium multiple.
So why is this? Why does it happen like this? Well, most of my audience out there building businesses—probably you, too, watching this—tend to have a marketing background. So let's put on our marketer's hat and ask ourselves, “What is a buyer’s psychology? What are they trying to do?” Let's get in the mind of a buyer for a minute.
When a buyer acquires a business that's already maxed out its growth, they're essentially buying themselves a valley of stagnation. Like I said, that's not good. They'll need to completely rework the business just to get any growth at all—new markets, new products, new systems—a massive undertaking with a high risk that they have the privilege of paying you a lot of money to try and hopefully make it happen. Not that great of a deal for them.
But when they buy a business on the upswing—on the S curve—they get a proven business, a proven model that's already working, that has a clear pathway to scale much further. That's why buyers will pay you a premium amount for your business, far above the average multiple that a business like yours might get, just because you're showing strong growth momentum in your P&L year over year. Even if the absolute numbers aren't as high as a plateaued business, you can get a much higher multiple than that plateaued business because you are growing, not stagnant.
As always, if you want the best possible valuation, then all you have to do is answer the question: How do I make my business the lowest amount of risk possible? When a buyer is looking at a business that's growing hand over fist, the risk seems a lot less because they get to have that upside that is already naturally happening—whether they do nothing at all once they acquire the business.
All right, hopefully I made my point clear about why you should be selling on the way up, but not at the top. Let's talk a little bit about some of the major benefits you are going to get if you sell your business this way.
First off is higher multiples. You are just going to sell your business for a higher amount of money. Businesses actively growing command significantly higher valuations, and buyers are more than happy to pay that valuation. If a business is growing and is doing $2 million in revenue with a 50% year-over-year growth, they might get a 4 to 5x of their earnings, whereas a stagnant $3 million revenue business might only get 2 to 3x. That is a pretty big difference, especially because it's so much easier to sell the first business than the second business.
This leads into the third really, really big benefit of you selling on the way up and just getting that “there's more juice left to squeeze” line out of your head. Trust me, it's a poison that has killed multiple millionaires. I talk to them every single week—people who could cash out big. Because they say this line to themselves, they literally shoot themselves in the foot.
So, when you sell on the upswing of the S curve, you are actually going to go through a much faster sales process. Growing businesses attract a lot more buyer interest. Because what are buyers trying to do? They're trying to buy growth. What happens if a lot of buyers are looking at your business at once? The competition for your business goes up. What happens if competition for your business goes up? Your multiples go up, your sales price goes up, you get better offers, and the other buyers don't want to lose you to the competition. So there’s a bit of FOMO, a sense of scarcity, urgency. There's only one of you, and there are several buyers all competing with each other. You are the darling at the ball, and you are able to control the negotiations so much better because you are such a valuable thing to a buyer.
Now, all of this—you might be nodding your head along with me the entire time, like, “Greg, this makes so much sense. Of course, I would not be like those other entrepreneurs you're talking about.” But I would challenge you on that, because I have a friend I'm helping with a little consult. He’s asking me questions like, “Hey, what should I do? What should I do here?” He has seen me speak about this type of stuff many, many times, so I remind him that he is going through the same kind of psychological debate. Right now, he has a business that could be sold very easily, in my view, or at least very fast for a high profit. The law of negotiations, all that kind of stuff. He has a very solid business that he could sell. But this little psychological trap is hindering his ability to do it, because he also thinks there's more juice left to squeeze.
So, I want to say you should challenge yourself on it. Make sure you're not falling for this trap, because, hey, I get it. It's hard to let go of your baby and see untapped potential in your business that you could have been rewarded by. But that one more project, that one more market—while it is tempting— I recommend that you take this mindset shift very deeply and very personally: that remaining potential, all that stuff you want to do, is precisely what makes your business so valuable to the buyers.
By selling at this stage, on your way up, you're not leaving any money on the table. Get that fantasy out of your mind. You're not leaving any money on the table. Instead, you're monetizing all that future growth potential that can come down the pipe, because that's what the buyer wants to do—and you don't have to do any of the work. You trade the potential future upside of your business for guaranteed money on the table today, in your pocket. And importantly, you transfer all that upside potential and the risk of execution to the buyer. Because we both know that ideas are great, but execution is what actually matters. A lot of times, a seller who is experiencing S curve growth has to reorganize and change the entire DNA of their business once they hit that summit to get out of the valley of stagnation. And a lot of times, the seller doesn’t want to do that—hence why they plateau for so long.
So, this is all very important mental mindset stuff that you should be thinking about and working on as a seller if your goal is to walk away with a life-changing amount of money by exiting the business.
Let's talk a little bit about tiny indicators here. There are a few green flags that you're in the Goldilocks zone of this S curve that I am talking about.
The first is you have consistent growth over six to eight quarters—a little bit over, a little bit under two years, up to two years. You want to show this year-over-year growth is not just a fad but is something that is actually happening repeatedly. Six to eight quarters—obviously, if it's longer, it's better—but six to eight quarters I would say is about the minimum.
Then, you also want to have proven product-market fit with repeatable customer acquisition. You should be able to show, “I have acquisition systems,” ideally that you can turn up and down, such as paid media, cold outreach campaigns—something that is a true-blue acquisition channel that shows it is working.
Next, you should have clear growth opportunities that you haven't yet pursued. Maybe because you don't have time, maybe you don't have the capital, maybe you just don't know how to do it. And it's a bit of everything, right? This is something you really feel very strongly about—that if it was done, the business would just explode. That's great. That's a great sign, because that means there's a clear path for growth.
Next, as your business is growing, it starts to need more systems and personnel—a team beyond what you can do. To handle the growth you're experiencing, you need to hire more help. These are all very good signs. It shows your business is in a state of growth, which is a very good flux for you to be in from a buyer perspective.
Next, you're starting to see competitors noticing your success. Maybe they're copying you. Maybe they copy your lead magnet, copy your ads from your Facebook ads library—things like this. Competition is noticing you, you're on notice, right? This is a good sign because that means the incumbents have a little bit of fear. They see you're growing, and the buyer will see that too, which is an amazing thing for you as someone who wants to sell. In fact, a lot of times the competitors, as in, “Oh God, how is he doing this?”—those might be your buyers, and they are the ones who will buy you for the highest price of almost any kind of buyer, because they're a strategic buyer.
So next, the last thing is—and this is probably the most important thing, and a lot of people don't think about it, but you should—is ideally your business is not reliant on you. Sorry for everyone that thinks personal brands are the most important thing in life and business—they’re not. They're helpful, don't get me wrong, they're very helpful. But we have sold over 2,000 businesses on Empire Flippers. And do you know how many of them had a personal brand? One. And it was really hard to sell. We almost didn't sell it, and it was a terrible deal for that seller, but it was the only way to get the deal done. So, almost no business, basically, has ever had a personal brand that we have sold out of the 2,000 businesses, more or less.
If you have a personal brand, that's great, but your business shouldn't be reliant on your personal brand. That's bad. You don't want that because the buyer can't be you. So you need to have a way of growing the business and demonstrably proving it doesn't rely on you for anything, including operations and marketing. Your personal brand should have little—ideally zero—effect on the business.
So, if you have these kind of green flags going for you, you might just be in the perfect Goldilocks zone to sell your business. And if you want to check out to see if you are, click the link in our description down below and get a free valuation from us. It takes less than five minutes to do, and it’s based on 2,000 businesses that we have sold. So you can go ahead and click the link down below if that's what you want to do.
But anyways, the perfect time to sell your business, remember, isn't at the peak. It's on the upward slope of your S curve. That's when you want to sell. That's the perfect place to sell. This is when you'll get the highest multiple, the most cash up front, and this is the fastest route to a life-changing exit for you.
So stop thinking about squeezing every last drop out of your business. Throw that mindset in the trash, because it's not helpful if your goal is to exit for a life-changing amount of money. There's always going to be more to do—it's an endless war path. You will never run out of things to do. So this is not a useful mindset for our purposes of trying to sell the business, right?
So, if that is your goal—if your goal is to find out, “When can I sell my business? Am I in this Goldilocks zone that Greg is telling me to be in?”—then your next best step is to simply click the link down below where you can get either a free valuation, like I mentioned, or you can say, “You know what, I'm ready to do this,” and just sell your business. If you submit your business for sale with us, it costs you literally nothing, and you're not beholden to us to sell with us, but you will get a professional valuation in exchange for your time.
Now, I want to leave you with one final question: Is it really better to squeeze more juice and get 10% extra revenue growth, or is it better to get a few million dollars in your pocket that you can have today at the moment of your exit? My bet is on the latter. Because imagine—what could you do with that type of money in your war chest, completely de-risked, just sitting there waiting for your next big idea? If you want to get there, let me sell your business. Talk to you soon.
