Premiership Football and selling your business

So there has been once again a recent spate of sackings in Footballs Premier League in England, this leads to the old debate is it a good thing to sack your manager? And secondly is it actually the managers fault?

Perhaps it’s not standing by your manager that makes you successful; it’s being successful that makes you (more likely to) stand by your manager.

Manchester United don’t keep winning because they’ve stuck by their manager; they’ve stuck by their manager because they keep on winning.

No, the most important thing is not whether to sack or not to sack but to choose the right manager in the first place and give him the right resources to be successful. By for example providing him with a large transfer budget, the best coaches and giving him time to carry out the task he has been appointed to achieve. Maybe therefore it is the Directors of the football club who are to blame if things don’t go right.

So why am I telling you this, after all this blog is not about football.

Well, there are business owners who instruct agent after agent after agent hoping that the new agent is able to sell their business. Then they sack their agent an appoint another one, blaming the agent for the lack of the sale.

But is it really the agents fault?

Yes there are bad agents, but the agent is simply doing his best with the resources that the business seller has provided to him.

If your agent is telling you that he has received feedback from buyers that they need recent financial accounts, that the business premises are run down, that the price is too high maybe you should not be blaming your agent but be looking at yourself.

The business owner should, if a lesson is to be learned from football, simply choose the right agent stick by him and make sure that he has all the resources to sell the business.

This entry was posted on 09/02/2009 at 07:05 pm and is filed under Selling Your Business, Business transfer agents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.