How to Sell a SaaS Business

I was 21 when I got my first offers to buy Closify and I didn’t know much about the process at ALL

and it is a much more complex process than you may think…

so I’m going to give you roughly 3 of the most important things to do from day 1, to give you the best shot at being able to sell your company and also getting the most for it possible

#1 HAVE CLEAN BOOKS

I cannot stress this enough… the average entrepreneurs profit and loss statements are a disaster

have a business account and business card, business expenses go on the business card, personal expenses don’t

know how much you’re paying yourself each month, are you paying yourself the most efficient amount?

Should your company file as an S corp? Then you pay yourself a salary and have payroll taxes

these are things that (sadly) aren’t taught to us in school but are incredibly important

no matter what business you run and even if you plan to sell ever or not, you NEED a good book keeper and accountant

I recommend this team - you can inquire here 

#2 Business can run without you AND someone new could easily come in and run the show

at the time you’re exiting, you should really be in a pretty managerial role

you should have people in different departments (marketing, sales, product, customer support, finance) reporting to you and you’re communicating with your operations manager maybe, or chief of staff, head of sales, etc about what tweaks need to be made to get back on track

you need to have standard operating procedures for EVERYTHING

how do you run a sales call? have recordings? how does the sales manager run meetings? how do you reply to different support tickets? how do you run cold email campaigns? how do you run ads? how do you use your CRM?

everything needs to be documented so someone can come in easily and if they make new hires they can quickly be brought to speed

#3 Low Churn / Lots of Users

this is incredibly important, churn, or the % of people that cancel each month is a huge factor in your valuation and appeal as a company to buy

you want to have a lot of users (duh) but when I say this it’s because some people have like 10 clients at 1k/mo for example which is good money but if 3 people churn you lose 30% of your revenue

so high ticket and low users isn’t always the best model

some things to help with churn are the following:

• have everyone get an onboarding call with a client success manager

• churn prevention email if they haven’t logged in for X days

• tutorials inside your app on how to use it best

there’s a lot more that goes into selling a company than this, but these are 3 of the biggest ones I experienced

now I’m building Zappx with this stuff in mind as well as all the other lessons I’ve learned, and I’m documenting it for you to follow my steps as well

if you want to build a software alongside me - click here and apply

best,

alex