When it comes to selling your business, there could be a multitude of reasons out there. You might be doing it to retire; or you could be trying to make a profit. The latter could potentially make you a ‘Serial Entrepreneur’: someone who start new business, get it running and successful & then sell it for a profit.
Whether or not that is the right path for you would depend on how you approach your business and what excites you.
What drives you?
Like serial-anything, it takes guts to be a serial entrepreneur, even if you’re only dealing with small businesses. You have to bear a lot of risk, work very hard on something that would eventually belong to someone else, and then you need to be able to detach yourself from the result of your efforts, clean the slate and move on to your next project. It doesn’t sound easy and it isn’t.
However, if you’re the kind of person who’s brimming with ideas; someone who wants to give all those ideas an equal chance, serial entrepreneurship might just be for you. If you believe that you can create a business but would lose interest pretty quickly when it comes to running it, you might want to go down this path. It’s not an easy path, but it’s definitely an exciting one.
Advantages of serial entrepreneurship
Fair warning, not everyone can pull this off. But if they do, there are several advantages to it.
- There’s a lot of flexibility in this kind of work. You aren’t bound by business hours, you don’t have to constantly deal with the clients and work hard to maintain the business that you’ve build. You can hand that off to someone else.
- Doesn’t demand constant attention as most serial entrepreneurs work on a project to project basis. For example, once they’ve created and successfully launched a business, they’ll sell it and go right back to the drawing board with a new idea. As a serial entrepreneur you never have to get involved into the daily operational grind that is required to maintain the business and drive a steady income.
- Serial entrepreneurs generally have to deal with less responsibility. They don’t really have many employees to look after, unless they’ve turned making businesses into a business. That’s another matter altogether.
Disadvantages of serial entrepreneurship
All those freedoms and advantages do come at a price.
- There’s a distinct lack of steady income and you need to have other income streams in place to ensure your financial security.
- This avenue is very unreliable. Not only do you need to build a successful, lucrative business from scratch, you need to find buyers.
