Finish Big Quotes

“Canadian entrepreneur John Warrillow, who has started five businesses and sold four of them. “I don’t believe you are really an entrepreneur until you’ve exited, because you haven’t completed the cycle. You’re still standing on third base. It is not about starting. Anyone can start a business. Until you’ve actually sold one, you haven’t touched all the bases.”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“buyout, a gift to your children, a liquidation of assets, or any of the other possible outcomes. Stage four is the transition. It begins with the completion of the deal and ends when you’re fully engaged in whatever comes next. Until you’ve moved on—not just physically but psychologically—to a new venture, a new career, a redefined role, or even retirement, your exit isn’t complete.”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“may also include coming up with a number—that is, the amount of money you’d be happy to walk away with when the time comes—and a time frame. Stage two is strategic. It requires learning to view your company as a product itself, not just as a deliverer of products or services, and then building into it the qualities and characteristics that will maximize its value and allow you to have the kind of exit you want. Stage three is about execution. It’s the process you go through to get a deal done, whatever type of exit you may be looking for, be it a sale to a third party, a management”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“It’s also about successfully navigating the four stages of the exit process: Stage one is exploratory. It involves investigating the many possibilities, doing the necessary introspective work, and deciding what you do and don’t care about in an exit.”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“And yet the end result is not always a happy one, even for those who wind up with a pile of money on the table. Despite having absolute financial security, often for the first time in their lives, many owners find themselves dealing with unanticipated regrets, fighting against depression, and desperately in need of a new identity and sense of purpose. For them, life after the exit is a bleak period, and it can last for years.”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“The mistake they make grows partly out of their tendency to regard the exit as simply an event, and a relatively distant one at that. But the exit is actually a critical phase of a business owner’s journey and an integral part of the entrepreneurial experience. “It’s like passing the 26.2-mile mark of a marathon, or crossing home plate after a home run,”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“Busyness is certainly one of the reasons that owners don’t think about whether or not their journey is taking them to a place they really want to wind up. They’re constantly preoccupied—it goes with the territory—and figuring out the ultimate destination doesn’t seem particularly urgent alongside, say, meeting the next payroll or landing the next big customer”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“they focus on survival. Some never leave the survival stage. The more fortunate ones move on to the growth stage. Either way, they run the risk of getting caught in what Covey calls “the activity trap,” the tendency “in the busy-ness of life to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall.”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“Just as important, thinking about an exit plan will force you to ask important, difficult questions about yourself.”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“First, the process will lead you to look for and adopt better business practices, as Ray Pagano did.”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“Pagano put out a suggestion box to capture them and took care to respond to each one. He also began writing monthly letters to employees’ families, which he sent to their homes, and invited family members to come in to view new products. “We truly wanted to involve everyone in the business,” he said.”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“You’re going to have to extract yourself from the business,” he said. “You’re going to have to bring up your management team, give them more responsibility, coach them more, and let them run the operation.” Pagano didn’t argue. He knew Anderson was right. Sale price aside, the number of potential acquirers, and thus Pagano’s own exit options, would be severely limited as long as he was essential to the company’s operation. He had to remake the business so that it could run without him if he wanted to improve his chances of getting a deal he’d be happy with.”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“I’ve used pseudonyms, in some instances because of my source’s legal commitments, in others to avoid gratuitous harm to the people mentioned. When I have disguised an individual, I have so indicated. Other than changing names and, in two instances, some telltale details about the company, I have reported what actually happened.”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“businesses. They had new lives that they were fully engaged in and excited about. For some people, there was a fifth element:         5) The companies they’d created were going on without them and doing better than ever, and they could take pride in the way they’d handled one of the most difficult tasks faced by any CEO: succession.”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“compensated for the work they’d put in and the risks they’d taken to build their businesses.         2) They had a sense of accomplishment. They could look back and know that through their businesses they’d contributed something of value to the world and had fun doing it.         3) They were at peace with what had happened to other people who’d helped build their businesses—how those people had been treated, how they’d been rewarded, and what they’d taken away from the experience.         4) They had discovered a new sense of purpose outside of their”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“I had to begin by clarifying in my own mind what a good exit consisted of. For most people, I’d found, there were four elements:         1) Owners felt that they’d been treated fairly during the exit process and appropriately”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top