Stopping something can be harder than starting something. So before you embark on a new path in life, it’s important to consider how the journey may end.
Take for instance, owning a business. It’s relatively straightforward to start a business. But the more your business grows, the more promises you’ll need to make and the more obligations you’ll have to satisfy. So shutting down a business is not an easy process.
You may think that selling your business is a viable strategy. But committing to sell a business can actually become a full-time job. And if your focus is on closing a deal, it means you’ll be less focused on the business performance, so you better have some good systems in place if the deal falls through.
Of course, you won’t be able to plan for every contingency, so it’s not feasible to prepare a full exit strategy before you begin. But you should be able to identify a few ways the journey could end, and in doing so you can better position yourself for these outcomes (and potentially reconsider starting if exiting is a greater challenge than you realised).
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