Is It Time to Sell? Five Signs You Might Be Ready to Sell Your Web Design Agency

Plenty of people dream of starting a web design agency, but surprisingly few actually think about what happens when they want to exit, let alone plan for it.

If you’ve run your web design agency for a while, you might be at the point where you’re considering selling, or perhaps the signs are there but you just haven’t given it any thought yet.

There’s never a right or wrong time to sell a business, but there can be times that are better than others. Whatever your situation, in this article, I share five reasons why now could be the right time for you to sell your web design agency.

01. You’ve Lost Your Spark

When most people start a new business, they’re usually full of energy and enthusiasm for it, and maybe you were the same.

Perhaps you were one of those people who couldn’t wait to get started every day, working long hours but enjoying every minute, and just loving the fact that you’re your own boss, in control of your own destiny, and enjoying meeting new people and working on lots of different projects.

But as businesses and business owners progress and grow, it’s not unusual for that initial spark to fade, and for running a business to start to feel more like a chore. Maybe you feel like you’re spending all your time on admin, and not doing the work that you actually enjoy. Perhaps you’ve grown a team and so you spend more time managing them than actually designing or developing websites.

Whatever your situation, if you’ve lost that spark and you just don’t look forward to work like you used to, it could be a sign that you’re ready to sell up and move onto something different – something that you might enjoy more.

02. Business is Going Really Well

This one probably sounds completely counterintuitive at first, but when a business is doing really well, it could actually be the perfect time to call it a day and walk away.

It can be easy to think that, if a business is doing well now, it will always do well, but as we all know, that’s very rarely the case. It’s true that some businesses do enjoy continued, sustained and increasing success, but those businesses tend to be in the minority, and it often takes a lot of hard work to keep them there.

What’s usually more common is that businesses peak, but then they start to fade away over time. It’s sad, but I’m sure we all know plenty of businesses that used to be really successful, but are now shadows of their former selves (if they still exist at all).

Why this is important is because of timing. A business’s value is usually tied to its financial performance, at the point that it’s valued. That means that if your business is doing well now and it can demonstrate that it’s on an upward trajectory, it could be worth a lot to someone else. If it does even better in the future, it could be worth even more.

But if it doesn’t do so well, then the value could actually decrease. So, you may need to ask yourself: Do you hold onto your business in the hope that it will do even better and increase in value, or do you call it quits now and walk away while your ahead?

It’s a tough question to answer, because no one has a crystal ball, and only you can make that decision. But if your business is performing the best it ever has, then this could be the ideal time to sell.

03. You’ve Achieved Your Goals

When most people start a new business, they usually have at least some idea of where they want it to go and what they want to achieve, and maybe you were the same. You may have wanted to grow your team to a certain size, or become a market leader in a certain sector or technology, or achieve a certain amount of revenue.

If you’ve achieved everything you set out to, you may be asking yourself: What’s next? Perhaps you want to achieve even more and so you’ve set even higher goals that you want to work towards, in which case great. Selling now may not be right for you.

But you might also be feeling a sense that you’ve done everything you’ve set out to do, in which case, selling up could be the perfect way to round out your journey, so that you can move onto new challenges elsewhere.

04. You Don’t Enjoy Being a Business Owner

Many people start businesses not because they’re necessarily good at business, but because they’re good something, and they want to make their own business out of it. That was certainly why I started my web design agency – I was good at being a web designer and developer, so I wanted to create my own version of the agencies that I had worked for.

But running a business is not the same as being good at your craft. Running a business is often hard, not everyone is cut out for it, and not everyone enjoys it. Running a business can actually be really stressful, and there’s always a lot to focus on. There are risks involved, it can take up a lot of your time, and if something goes wrong, there can be stiff financial consequences.

So, if you’re at a point where you don’t feel suited to being a business owner – or you just don’t enjoy it anymore – and you want to go back to a simpler life with less responsibility, then there’s no shame in that. In fact, this can be one of the main reasons why many business owners choose to sell their businesses, so you’re not alone.

One of the easiest ways to understand where you might be is to ask yourself this simple question: Do you look forward to starting work every day, or do you dread it? If you find you get to Sunday afternoons and you start getting feelings of anxiety or dread about starting work on Monday morning, then this could be a sign that it’s time to sell up and let someone else take the reins.

05. You Want to Cash in and Reap the Rewards

If you create a successful business, in this case a web design agency, and that business is successful enough that someone else wants to pay you money for it, then you’ve created something of value. In many ways, the business itself becomes the product to sell, just like the websites that the business creates for your customers.

When I say a ‘successful’ business, I don’t just mean one that earns lots of money. That is a part of it, but a business that’s successful enough to be valuable to someone else is one that’s stable, sustainable, and built on solid foundations.

That includes things like having a good reputation, having good, long-standing relationships with your clients, perhaps a strong team, good client servicing, robust systems and processes, and overall, a business that produces good quality work at competitive prices, while still making healthy profits.

If you’ve worked hard and invested your time and energy into creating a successful and sustainable business like this, then it’s perfectly fair that, one day, when you’re ready, you should be able to sell up and reap the rewards for all your hard work.