Tag Archives: Sellability Score

The Downside of Just Milking It

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

If you have considered selling your business of late, you may have been disappointed to see the offers a business like yours would garner from would-be acquirers.

According to the latest analysis of some 20,000 business owners who have used The Value Builder System, the average offer being made by acquirers is just 3.7 times your pre-tax profit.  Companies with less than a million dollars in sales garner significantly lower multiples, and larger businesses may get closer to five times the pre-tax profit, but regardless of size private company multiples are still significantly less than those reserved for public company stocks.

Given the paltry offer multiples, you may be tempted to hold on to your business and “milk it” for decades to come. After all, you might reason that if you hang onto your business for four or five more years, you could withdraw the same amount in dividends as you would garner from a sale and still own 100% of the business.

This logic – let’s call it the “Just Milk It Strategy” – seems sound on the surface, but there are some significant risks to consider.

You Shoulder the Risk

The biggest downside of holding on to your business, rather than selling it, is that you retain all of the risk. Most entrepreneurs have an optimism bias, but you need only remember how life felt in 2009 to be reminded that economic cycles go in both directions. While business may feel good today, the next five years could well be bumpy for a lot of founders.

Disk Drive Space

If you think of your brain like a computer’s disk drive, owning a business is like constantly running anti-virus software. Yes, in theory you can do other things like play golf or enjoy a bicycle trip through Tuscany and still own your business, but as long as you are the owner, your business will always occupy a large chunk of your brain’s capacity. This means family fun, vacations and weekends are always tainted with the background hum of your brain’s operating system churning through data.

Capital Calls

Let’s say your business generates $500,000 in Earnings Before Interest Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization (EBITDA), and you could sell your company for four times EBITDA or keep it. You may argue it’s better to keep it, pull your profit out in the form of dividends, and capture the same cash in four years as you would by selling it. This theory breaks down in capital-intensive businesses where there is usually a big difference between EBITDA and cash in the bank. If you have to buy machines, finance your customers, or stock inventory, a lot of your cash will be locked up in feeding your business and the amount of cash you can pull out of your business each year is a fraction of your EBITDA.

Tax Treatment

Depending on your tax jurisdiction, the sale proceeds of your business may be more favourably treated than income you would garner by paying yourself handsomely with the Just Milk It Strategy. You may actually need to pay yourself $2 or $3 for every $1 you can net from the advantageous tax treatment of a business sale.

You Can Do Better

Finally, you may be able to attract an offer higher than three or four times your pretax profit. The businesses we work with who have a Value Builder Score of 80 + get offers that are, on average, 6.1 times their pretax profit. Some of the owners we work with do even better, stretching multiples into double digits.

If you’d like to get your Value Builder Score, please let us know by replying to this email and we will make arrangements for you to complete the 13-minute questionnaire.

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.

90 Days That Will Define Your Business Forever

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

You’ve done the hard work of winning a new customer, but it’s what you do in the next 90 days that determines if it’ll stick around.

The first 90 days of any new relationship are critical:

  • A president has about three months to inspire the electorate and gain the political capital he needs to govern.
  • A young team prospect has but a few months to impress his coach before being sent down to the minors.
  • A new CEO has 90 days to learn her job before the rank and file start expecting tangible leadership.

The Onboarding Window: The First 90 Days

For a young company, the first 90 days of a customer relationship are equally important. Research into the subscription business model shows that getting a customer to effectively start using your product in the first 90 days leads to an increase in lifetime value of up to 300 percent for some companies.

Take a look at marketing software provider Constant Contact, which used to struggle with the first 90 days of a new customer relationship. In the old days, Constant Contact took a “who, what, when” approach to onboarding new customers. Who stood for who a customer wanted to send an email campaign to; what stood for what the customer wanted to send; and when described the timing of the campaign. After users signed up for its service, Constant Contact would ask customers to upload their email database (the who in the three-step onboarding process). This required the new user to upload a customer list–which is the trickiest part of the onboarding experience. It required the customer to leave Constant Contact’s site and struggle with how to export a contact list–often from a jury-rigged database kept in Excel or Outlook. The process was awkward, and many new customers stopped using Constant Contact because they hit a barrier before they had a chance to fall in love with the Constant Contact software.

What, Who, When

Wanting to stem new customer churn, Constant Contact changed its on boarding to focus first on the what. Immediately after signing up, new users were encouraged to create their first email campaign. Suddenly customers were seeing their campaign come to life in front of their eyes. Constant Contact offered customers a library of stock images that looked more beautiful than anything a business owner had used in the past. Customers could see firsthand how professional their company was going to look. Only after the customer had completed the what stage and earned the emotional reward of seeing its first campaign come to life, did Constant Contact switch to the who part of creating a campaign. The difference was, by this point, Constant Contact had enough relationship equity with the customer to get it over the hump of uploading its database.

This minor reordering of the onboarding flow led to a dramatic reduction in customer churn–which is the death knell of any subscription business.

Whether you’re in a subscription business, or still using a transaction business model, how you treat a customer in the first 90 days will go a long way in determining their overall satisfaction. To benchmark your customer satisfaction against world class brands, get your Value Builder Score now https://www.ironshield.ca/sellability-score/

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.

How to Get Rich in 3 (Really Difficult) Steps

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

Becoming wealthy may not be your primary goal, but if it is, there is a reasonably predictable way to get rich in America.

Step 1: Ignore Your Parents

Parents around the world typically encourage their kids to get educated so they can get a ‘good job.’ This may mean becoming a doctor or lawyer, although neither tends to be a path to significant wealth. High-paying professions provide an excellent income stream, but two insidious forces undermine the professional’s ability to create significant wealth: tax and spending.

Tax

It is difficult to become wealthy on the basis of a salary alone. Since income is taxed at the highest possible rate, you’re left with not much more than 50 cents on the dollar.

Spending

The other problem with having a high income is that it creates a ‘wealth effect’ that triggers spending. Thomas J. Stanley, the famous author of the research-driven classic The Millionaire Next Door, points out that some professionals—in particular, lawyers—spend a large portion of their income to give the impression that they are successful, in part because they do not enjoy much social status from their job. In other words, when you earn $500,000 a year, you buy a Range Rover or send your kids to an elite private school at least in part because you want people to think you are wealthy.

Step 2: Start Something

Most wealth in America is created through owning a business. Recently, Mass Mutual looked at the proportion of business owners that make up a number of wealth cohorts. They found that 17 percent of people with between $100,000 and $500,000 to invest were business owners.

Keep in mind that there are about 8 million employer-based companies in the United States, meaning that the incidence rate of business ownership (the natural rate at which you find business owners in the general population) is about three percent. Said another way, if you grabbed 100 people walking down the street, on average three of them would be business owners. On the other hand, if you took a random sample of 100 people with investable assets of between $100,000 and $500,000, 17 of them would be business owners, meaning you’re over five times more likely to find a business owner in the $100,000 to $500,000 wealth segment than you are to find an employee in the same segment.

The trend becomes more pronounced the higher up the wealth ladder you go. If you look at wealthy investors with between $500,000 and $1,000,000 in investable assets, you’ll see that the proportion of business owners in this segment goes up dramatically—to27 percent.

The Very Rich

Among investors with between $1 million and $10 million in investable assets, the proportion of business owners jumps to 52 percent. As for those investors with $10 million to $50 million sloshing around in their bank account, 67 percent are business owners; and for investors with $50 million dollars or more in investable assets, 86 percent are business owners.

Simply put, if you meet someone who is very rich, it’s highly likely they are (or were) a business owner.

Step 3: Get Liquid

The next step for you as a business owner is to focus on improving the value of your business so that you can sell it for a premium. Just being a successful entrepreneur is typically not enough to become rich. You have to find a way to take the equity you have locked up in your business and turn it into liquid assets. When it comes to selling your business, the three most common options are:

  • Acquisition: This is the headline-popping way some entrepreneurs choose to trade their shares for cash. When Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion, founders Brian Action and Jan Koum got very rich.
  • Re-capitalization:A minority or majority “re-cap” occurs when you sell a stake in your company (often to a private equity firm) yet continue to run your business as both a manager and part owner, with a chunk of your wealth in liquid assets outside of your business.
  • Management Buyout:In an MBO, you invite your management team (or a family member) to buy you out over time, usually with a mixture of some cash from the profits of your business as well as debt that the managers take on. There are other, less common ways to turn your equity into cash (e.g., an IPO), but the key is turning the illiquid wealth in your business into diversified liquid wealth. The best part about selling a business is that the wealth created is taxed at a very low rate compared to employment income, so you get to keep most of what you make.

You might argue it is better to keep all of your wealth tied up in your business as it grows, but that can be a risky proposition—just ask Lululemon’s Chip Wilson or BlackBerry’s cofounder Mike Lazaridis. If you keep your money locked up in your business, it also means you may not be able to enjoy the benefits of wealth. You can’t use illiquid stock in a private company to buy an around-the-world plane ticket or a ski chalet in Aspen. You actually have to get liquid first.

There are many good reasons to build a business; and for you, wealth creation may not be as important as making an amazing product or leading a great team. But if money is what you’re after, there is no better way to get rich than to start and sell a successful business.

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.

Did you miss the perfect time to sell your business?

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

August was a rollercoaster ride for stockholders. Triple digit wins followed by even larger losses left the average investor reeling and were a good reminder that markets move in both directions.

Valuations of privately held businesses have also been somewhat turbulent of late. The average offer extended to users of The Value Builder System was 4.2 pretax profit in Q1, 2015, but dropped to 3.9 in Q2.

Does that mean you have missed the opportunity to sell your business at the peak?

Maybe. But should you care? Probably not.

The thing many of us forget is that when you sell your company possibly your largest asset and the biggest wealth-creating event of your lifetime you have to do something with the money you make.

These days, that means you’ll have to turn around and invest your windfall into an asset class that is arguably somewhat bubbly in historical terms. The stock market has more than doubled since 2009. The price of residential real estate has been growing at a rate of 1 percent per month in many major centres. The same trend can be seen in many markets that offer exclusive beach houses or ski chalets.

Who Is Richer: Samantha or Scott?

Indulge us in a hypothetical example. Let’s look at two imaginary business owners, each running a company generating a pretax profit of $500,000. Let’s imagine that Samantha sold her business into the teeth of the recession for three times her pretax profit back in 2009. She would have walked away with $1.5 million pretax to invest in the stock market.

Now let’s imagine business owner Scott, who decides to try and time the market. Scott waited out the recession and sold his business last month for four times pretax profit, walking away with $2 million before deal costs. At first glance, Scott looks like the winner because he sold at the peak and got four times profit instead of Samantha’s three times. But when we take a closer look, Samantha would probably be better off today. Assuming she had invested her $1.5 million in the stock market back in 2009, when the Dow was trading below 7,000 points, she would now have more than $3 million, or a third more than Scott, who waited and sold at the “peak.”

Timing the sale of your business on the basis of external markets is often a zero-sum game, because unless you’re going to hide the proceeds of a sale under your mattress, you’re probably buying into the same market conditions from which you’re selling out.

A better approach is to optimize your business against the eight things acquirers look for when they buy a business, regardless of what’s happening in the economy overall.

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.

4 Steps To Finding Your Sell-By Date

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

Most business owners think selling their business is a sprint, but the reality is it takes a long time to sell a company.

The sound of the gun sends blood flowing as you leap forward out of the blocks. Within five seconds you’re at top speed and within a dozen your eye is searching for the next hand. Then you feel the baton become weightless in your grasp and your brain tells you the pain is over. You start an easy jog and you smile, knowing that you did your best and that now the heavy lifting is on someone else’s shoulders.

That’s probably how most people think of starting and selling a business: as something akin to a 4 × 100-metre relay race. You start from scratch, build something valuable, measuring time in months instead of years, and sprint into the waiting arms of Google (or Apple or Facebook) as they obligingly acquire your business for millions. They hand over the cheque and you ride off into the sunset. After all, that’s how it worked for the guys who started Nest and WhatsApp – right?

But unfortunately, the process of selling your business looks more like an exhausting 100-mile ultra-marathon than a 100-metre sprint. It takes years and a lot of planning to make a clean break from your company – which means it pays to start planning sooner rather than later.

Here’s how to backdate your exit:

Step 1: Pick your eject date

The first step is to figure out when you want to be completely out of your business. This is the day you walk out of the building and never come back. Maybe you have a dream to sail around the world with your kids while they’re young. Perhaps you want to start an orphanage in Bolivia or a vineyard in Tuscany.

Whatever your goal, the first step is writing down when you want out and jotting some notes as to why that date is important to you, what you will do after you sell, with whom, and why.

Step 2: Estimate the length of your earn out

When you sell your business, chances are good that you will get paid in two or more stages. You’ll get the first cheque when the deal closes and the second at some point in the future – if you hit certain goals set by the buyer. The length of your so-called earnout will depend on the kind of business you’re in.

The average earnout these days is three years. If you’re in a professional services business, your earnout could be as long as five years. If you’re in a manufacturing or technology business, you might get away with a one-year transition period.

Estimate: + 1-5 years

Step 3: Calculate the length of the sale process

The next step is to figure out how long it will take you to negotiate the sale of your company. This process involves hiring an intermediary (a mergers and acquisitions professional, investment banker or business broker), putting together a marketing package for your business, shopping it to potential acquirers, hosting management meetings, negotiating letters of intent, and then going through a 60 to 90 day due diligence period. From the day you hire an intermediary to the day the wire transfer hits your account, the entire process usually takes 6 to 12 months. To be safe, budget one year.

Estimate: + 1 year

Step 4: Create your strategy-stable operating window

Next you need to budget some time to operate your business without making any major strategic changes. An acquirer is going to want to see how your business has been performing under its current strategy so they can accurately predict how it will perform under their ownership. Ideally, you can give them three years of operating results during which you didn’t make any major changes to your business model.

If you have been running your business over the last three years without making any strategic shifts, you won’t need to budget any time here. On the other hand, if you plan on making some major strategic changes to prepare your business for sale, add three years from the time you make the changes.

Estimate: + 3 years

Figuring out when to sell

The final step is to figure out when you need to start the process. Let’s say you want to be in Tuscany by age 50. You budget for a three-year earn out, which means you need to close the deal by age 47. Subtract one year from that date to account for the length of time it takes to negotiate a deal, so now you need to hire your intermediary by age 46. Then let’s say you’re still tweaking your business model – experimenting with different target markets, channels and models. In this case, you need to lock in on one strategy by age 43 so that an acquirer can look at three years of operating results.

It certainly would be nice to make a clean, crisp break from your business after an all-out sprint, but for the vast majority of businesses, the process of selling a company is a squishy, multi-year slog. So the sooner you start, the better.

This Sellability Score you instantly receive is a critical component to any business owner’s complete financial plan and is something that, until now, we have made available only to existing clients.

However, we recognized that there is value in knowing in advance of working with a financial planner whether or not your largest asset is ready to be exchanged for your retirement nest egg. Our view is that it’s better to learn more about your businesses sellability today, and find out how your business scores on the eight key attributes, so that you can ensure you obtain full value.

If your business part of your retirement plan, finding out your sellability score will be the best 10 minutes you could ever spend working “on” your business.

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.

How To Scale Up Your Service Business

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

Increase the value of your company by training others in your area of expertise.

It can be tough to grow a service business. Clients are typically buying your expertise, and if all you have to sell is time, the size of your business will always be limited by the number of hours in your day.

One way to scale up your service business is to launch a training division to teach others what you know. That’s what Nancy Duarte did when she found herself run ragged trying to grow Duarte, a Mountain View, California-based design studio.

Duarte’s specialty was creating high-impact presentations (her firm created the slides Al Gore used in the movie The Inconvenient Truth), but the work was tough to scale. She found herself spinning various plates and hoping none of them would fall to the ground. Finally she realized she was exhausted and no longer enjoying her job. She still loved the business but hated the constant demands on her time and energy.

In an effort to pull herself out of individual projects, she sat down and documented her methodology and from there created an internal training course so her employees could learn the Duarte way of creating presentations.

Once she had taught her own staff to handle the development of the presentations, she turned her philosophy and her approach into a book that was published in 2008 under the title Slide:ology – The art and science of creating great presentations. Her most recent book, Resonate: Present visual stories that transform audiences, was published in 2010). Having created a platform with the books, Nancy launched her training division, which offers corporate on-site workshops—her facilitators go to large companies to teach the employees how to make better presentations.

Due in large part to the training division, Duarte has scaled up her service business to the point where she now employs 82 people.

As business owners, we all know we should be documenting our systems for others to follow, but somehow writing our owner’s manual always takes a backseat to serving the next customer or fighting the next fire. Maybe what we need to do is stop thinking of writing down our process as an internal chore and instead focus on launching a training division. That way, the job of documenting our system goes from a textbook-boring task to the raw material needed to launch a revenue-generating business division.

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.

4 Traps To Avoid When Selling Your Company

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

Business owners have been known to refer to due diligence as “the entrepreneur’s proctology exam.” It’s a crude analogy but a good representation of what it feels like when a stranger pokes, prods, and looks inside every inch of your business.

Most professional acquirers will have a checklist of questions they need answered if they’re considering buying your company. They’ll want answers to questions like:

  • When does your lease expire and what are the terms?
  • Do you have consistent, signed, up-to-date contracts with your customers and employees?
  • Are your ideas, products and processes protected by patent or trademark?
  • What kind of technology do you use, and are your software licenses up to date?
  • What are the loan covenants on your credit agreements?
  • How are your receivables? Do you have any late payers or deadbeat customers?
  • Does your business require a license to operate, and if so, is your paperwork in order?
  • Do you have any litigation pending?

In addition to these objective questions, they’ll also try to get a subjective sense of your business. In particular, they will try to determine just how integral you are personally to the success of your business.

Subjectively assessing how dependent the business is on you requires the buyer to do some investigative work. It’s more art than science and often requires a potential buyer to use a number of tricks of the trade, such as:

Trick #1: Juggling calendars

By asking to make a last-minute change to your meeting time, an acquirer gets clues as to how involved you are personally in serving customers.

If you can’t accommodate the change request, the acquirer may probe to find out why and try to determine what part of the business is so dependent on you that you have to be there.

Trick #2: Checking to see if your business is vision impaired

An acquirer may ask you to explain your vision for the business, which is a question you should be well prepared to answer. However, he or she may ask the same question of your employees and key managers. If your staff members offer inconsistent answers, the acquirer may take it as a sign that the future of the business is in your head.

Trick #3: Asking your customers why they do business with you

A potential acquirer may ask to talk to some of your customers. He or she will expect you to select your most passionate and loyal customers and, therefore, will expect to hear good things. However, the customers may be asked a question like ‘Why do you do business with these guys?’ The acquirer is trying to figure out where your customers’ loyalties lie. If your customers answer by describing the benefits of your product, service or company in general, that’s good. If they respond by explaining how much they like you personally, that’s bad.

Trick #4: Mystery shopping

Acquirers often conduct their first bit of research behind your back before you even know they are interested in buying your business. They may pose as a customer, visit your website, or come into your company to understand what it feels like to be one of your customers.

Make sure the experience your company offers a stranger is tight and consistent, and try to avoid personally being involved in finding or serving brand-new customers. If any potential acquirers see you personally as the key to wooing new customers, they’ll be concerned business will dry up when you leave.

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.

Subscribers Make Your Company More Valuable

Republished with permission from Built to Sell Inc.

subscribe button

Why are Amazon, Apple and many of the most promising Silicon Valley start-ups leveraging a subscription business model?

Subscribers not only provide steady revenue; they make your company more valuable in the eyes of an acquirer. In a traditional business, customers buy your product or service once and may or may not choose to buy again; but in a subscription business, you have “automatic” customers who have agreed to purchase from you on an ongoing basis.

There are at least nine subscription models that can be leveraged by businesses ranging from service companies to market research firms to manufacturing concerns.

Recurring Revenue

Recurring revenue—the hallmark of a subscription business—is attractive to acquirers and makes your business more valuable when it’s time to sell. How much more valuable? To answer that, one has to first look at how your business will be valued without a subscription offering.

The most common methodology used to value a small to midsize business is discounted cash flow. This methodology forecasts your future stream of profits and then discounts it back to what your future profit is worth to an investor in today’s dollars, given the time value of money. This investment theory may sound like MBA talk, but discounted cash flow valuation is something you have likely applied in your personal life without knowing it. For example, what would you pay today for an investment that you hope will be worth $100 one year from now? You would likely “discount” the $100 by your expectation for a return on investment. If you expect to earn a 7 percent return on your money each year, you’d pay $93.46 ($100 divided by 1.07) today for an investment you expect to be worth $100 in 12 months.

Using the discounted cash flow valuation methodology, the more profit the acquirer expects your company to make in the future—and the more reliable your estimates—the more your company is worth. Therefore, to improve the value of a traditional business, the two most important levers you have are: 1) how much profit you expect to make in the future; and 2) the reliability of those estimates.

At SellabilityScore.com, one can see the effect of this valuation methodology. Since 2012, this methodology has been used to track the offers received by business owners who have completed the Sellability questionnaire. During that time, the average business with at least $3 million in revenue has been offered 4.6 times its pretax profit. Therefore, a traditional business churning out 10 percent of pretax profit on $5 million in revenue can reasonably expect to be worth around $2,300,000 ($5,000,000 x 10 percent x 4.6).

Then compare the value of a traditional company with the value of a subscription business. When an acquirer looks at a healthy subscription company, she sees an annuity stream of revenue throwing off years of profit into the future. This predictable stream of future profit means she is willing to pay a significant premium over what she would pay for a traditional company. How much of a premium depends on the industry, and some of the biggest premiums today go to companies in the software industry.

Subscription-based Software Companies

To understand what is going on in the valuation of subscription-based software companies, look at Dmitry Buterin. Buterin runs a subscription software company called Wild Apricot. He has also formed one of the world’s first mastermind groups of small and midsize subscription company founders, and each month the group meets to discuss strategies for running a subscription business.

Members of the group were constantly raising money or being courted by investors, so the topic of valuation came up a lot in their conversations. Buterin found that the consensus valuation range being offered to member companies was between 24 and 60 times monthly recurring revenue (MRR), which is equivalent to two to five times annual recurring revenue (ARR).

One way to validate Buterin’s numbers is to check with another guru from the world of subscription-based software companies. Zane Tarence is a partner with Birmingham, Alabama-based Founders Investment Banking, a company that specializes in selling software companies that use the subscription business model. Tarence estimates the valuation ranges he sees as belonging in one of three buckets:

24-48 x MRR (2-4 x ARR)
These are typically very small software companies with less than $5 million in recurring annual revenue. Companies in this first bucket are usually growing modestly, with subscription cancellation rates (i.e., “churn”) in the area of 2-4 percent per month.

48-72 x MRR (4-6 x ARR)
These are larger software companies with recurring revenue of at least $5 million annually, which they are growing at the rate of 25-50 percent per year. Their net churn is typically below 1.5 percent per month.

72-96 x MRR (6-8 x ARR)
These are the rare, fast-growth software companies that are growing more than 50 percent per year, with at least $5 million in annual revenue and net churn below 1 percent per month. These companies usually offer a solution (typically an industry-specific one) that their customers need to use to get their jobs done.

The software business is an extreme example of the benefits of subscription revenue, but no matter what industry you’re in, your company will likely command a premium if it enjoys recurring revenue.

From Alarm Systems to Prescriptions to Mosquitoes

For example, security businesses that monitor alarm systems and charge a recurring monthly monitoring fee to do so are worth about twice as much as security businesses that just do system installations. Retail pharmacies with a large pool of prescriptions for drugs that people take every day, like Lipitor and Lozol, command a premium over a traditional retailer because customers re-up their pills on a regular basis, creating a recurring revenue stream for the pharmacist.

Even tiny companies are worth more if they have subscription revenue. When my colleagues over at the Sellability Score analyzed very small businesses with less than $500,000 in sales, they found that the average offer these small businesses attract is 2.6 times pretax profit.

Compare that to the average Mosquito Squad franchise. Mosquito Squad is a Richmond, Virginia-based company that offers to keep bugs off your patio by spraying your backyard regularly with a proprietary chemical recipe approved by the Environmental Protection Agency. Mosquito Squad franchisees target affluent home owners with an average home value north of $500,000 who entertain in their backyard and don’t want to be bothered by mosquitoes. Mosquito Squad operates on a subscription basis. You subscribe to a season of spraying, which includes 8 to 12 sprays, depending on how buggy it is where you live.

Mosquito Squad is a franchise business, and the impact of its recurring revenue model on its valuation is remarkable. According to Scott Zide, the president of Mosquito Squad’s parent company, Outdoor Living Brands, Mosquito Squad franchises that changed hands over the most recent five-year period had revenue of $463,223 and sold for 3.7 times their pretax profit. That’s a 42 percent premium over the traditional value of a company with less than $500,000 in sales, and it’s because Mosquito Squad operates on a recurring subscription model and 73 percent of its annual spraying contracts renew each year.

Whether you plan to build a subscription-based software application or the simplest personal services business, having recurring revenue will boost the value of your most important asset.

Sellability Score

For more free information on Creating A Business Owner’s Dream Financial Plan, you can listen to a free, eight part series we did exclusively for business owners. The show is also available to subscribe to for free via iTunes.