Metrics to measure your small business exit strategy

How could you benefit from having an exit dashboard?

• Can you monitor your business metrics that matter and share them with a prospective buyer?

  • Customer retention numbers - New, retained, upsell, reduction and churn

  • Average Order Value AOV

  • Customer Lifetime Value LTV

  • Customer Acquisition Cost CAC

  • Average Customer Lifetime

  • Yearly, Quarterly, Monthly, Daily sales numbers

  • Period over period increase or decrease

  • Gross margin

  • Profit margin

• If you have business metrics to show, are they automated?

  • Is data pulled to a central storage automatically and regularly?

  • Do you have a dashboard to display the metrics that matter?

  • Can your metrics be seen at the line item level and aggregated to all other levels? 

    • Financial documents are good for high level, but looking into segments can be very informative.

  • This can start as small as just your payment processor data for analysis and trending and grow to include:

    • Customer retention - New, Retained, Upgrade, Downgrade and Churn

    • Segmentation for marketing, pricing, profit etc.

• Where you told by a business broker that your business was unsellable as is?

  • If your business has a lot of transactions, like 100s thousands transactions per year,  then pulling data together into a central place and creating automated processes to refresh a dashboard can help you get the business ready to sell as well as be a source of information to a prospective buyer.

  • For small businesses, this may run within the free tier allotment of Google BigQuery.

• Do you have a need for confidential data analytics?

  • No interferance or disruption to current business operations.

  • Financial statements are good for high level analysis, details are needed for deeper insights.

  • Insights to discover unrealized potential both in the business and in the strategic acquisition targets that you will pursue.