Learn More about How to Grow a Wealthy Company Watch Lisa Nirell's on-demand webinar How to Build a Practical Marketing Blueprint to Grow Your Business.

Your business is a living organism—something that has the potential to grow and thrive long after you've played your role in it. Yet many firms are still healing from a very tough recession and are stuck in neutral. The "new normal" is being defined by new realities, and not all of them are positive. They include industry consolidation, longer sales cycles, fee pressures, and tight credit. If you are a growth-oriented services firm, what can you do to ensure that your company swiftly returns to wealth-creation mode?

Most CPAs, attorneys, investment bankers, and business brokers will tell you to focus on some fundamental issues to improve your company valuation and viability. They will assert that certain criteria are the key to maximizing your eventual exit potential or sales price. They will refer to these as "value drivers." According to Ned Minor, an attorney and author of Deciding to Sell Your Business, "Value drivers are those characteristics that influence a buyer's decision about how much to pay for a company. These include—but are not limited to—a stable, motivated management team, effective financial controls, a realistic growth strategy, and a facility appearance consistent with the asking price."

While those value drivers sound logical on the surface, they provide only a partial definition of wealth for professional services firms.

What Does 'Wealth' Really Mean?

Even if you are just a one-person firm, you must develop a fundamental understanding of how wealth is created and defined. Over the centuries, wealth has been defined in myriad ways. It's up to you to determine which definition best serves your business goals.

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