Welcome back to Reimagining Your Business with Audria Richmond, and I am back with our final section of reimagining your business. Now this last section is one of those sections where you're, 1, you probably have thought about this or 2, you haven't gave it much thought. I know for me, when I first got into business, I was using my business to have a means to an end. Right? To make money, to be able to live a very comfortable life.

But as I have matured in business, you really should not be treating your business like your baby. Your business is an asset, and it should be treated as such. So, yes, you can keep your business and run it to the day you retire, you know, maybe you pass it down to a family member. But there are a lot of sophisticated ways of exiting your business without just saying it's over. Okay?

And so I wanna give you some ideas just to kinda be thinking about this, and then we're gonna get into the 2 questions that I'm gonna ask you before we conclude with this audio program. So when it comes to exiting your business, you could do family succession, which is where you pass it down to a particular family member. You can sell it to a partner or a co owner. So let's say that you are in business with someone else, you can allow the person you partner with or the co owner to take it over. You can sell your business to your employees, if you have any employees.

You could do a 3rd party sale, which is to sell the business to another entrepreneur or an investor, or you can hire a broker to go find buyers and negotiate terms. You could do mergers and acquisitions. So merchant acquisition is typically, you know, seen at a very high level. So, like, you may see, like, 2 airlines come together, or, 2 major brands come together that typically sell the same products, but they're coming together to increase market share. So mergers and acquisition is an option.

You may decide to take your business public, which we would be considered an IPO, which is an initial public offering. You may decide to just liquidate the business, sell off the assets, and close the business. You may decide to franchise your business. That may be a way to, you know, get another aspect to the business that you maybe haven't considered before. You may want to do a strategic alliance or joint, venture.

Right? Where you get someone, you do a partnership, and then you have another business take it over. So again, there is a lot of ways that you can get rid of the business and, you know, get done with it. But when you're thinking about exiting your business, you do want to be thinking about that. So the 2 questions I have for you for this section is 1, do you know how you want to exit your company?

And number 2, have you started thinking about secession planning? I know this may seem like, well, I'm just getting started with my business or I haven't been in business long enough to even be thinking about that. And I'm a tell you now, this is something as soon as my mother passed away, I started thinking about life totally different. Okay? Totally different.

And so when we talk about succession planning, it's about you really knowing what's gonna happen if something happened to you. If you get illed, if you pass away, like what's gonna happen to the business? What's going to happen to all this time, energy, and effort, and assets that you have created? Have you start to identify a successor? Like, who do you actually want to take over your business?

So hopefully, you're ready to continue the conversation and join us inside of our uncloned community. Right? We've been telling you about how to get there. You can get there by visiting unclonedot group. But as we bring this audio program to a close, I would like to thank you so much for listening to each section, for taking the time to reimagine your business.

And I pray that this audio series gave you everything that you need, right, to build a brand that you absolutely love, build a brand that's the obvious choice of your industry, and most important, right, just most importantly, is running a business that you absolutely love with all of your soul. So until next time, y'all. Let's go live an unclown life and build an unclown brand. Bye, y'all.