Even if you don't think you want to exit, you should plan for it

Most founders don't fail when trying to sell their company—they fail years earlier by becoming the only person who knows how everything works. In this episode, Alane and Micah explore what it really takes to build an exit-ready business, from documenting processes to leveraging AI for knowledge capture. They introduce the "No Yeah Buts" test and discuss how to transition from being an essential founder to an optional owner who has real choices about their future.

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Transcript

Micah Johnson (00:00)
Most founders don't fail when they're trying to sell their company. They fail years earlier by becoming the only person who knows how everything works.

If you're waiting to think about exiting later or tell yourself you're eventually going to document it, keep listening because this episode's for you.

Alane Boyd (00:18)
It seems like a lot of founders that I've been talking to are having thoughts of exiting in their trajectory.

Micah Johnson (00:25)
Yeah, way more than usual right now. A lot of people are talking about it.

Alane Boyd (00:30)
Yeah, we are getting older, so that could be just our friend group too.

Micah Johnson (00:34)
Are we though?

It could be. It could be. It could also be just the state of the economy. What's going on with technology? People getting scared about what's going on and saying, hey, maybe I should start thinking about this.

Alane Boyd (00:48)
Absolutely. you know, technology is adding a new pressure that we didn't even feel before because there is so much movement and AI that you've got to stay on top of and implement in your company. And I do think that there's just this side of being tired and burnt out. And it's like, I just don't have it in me anymore to keep up with moving this fast.

Micah Johnson (01:10)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the trends, mean, and we've, we've been through this personally, the ability to say, Hey, I'm ready to sell. I'm ready to be done. I remember with our last business, even before the merger, there, there was a point where I'm like, I'm out, I'm done with this. I'm burnt out. I don't want to do this anymore. I'm tired of this industry. Name all the things that if you're listening, you're probably have at least thought.

Alane Boyd (01:38)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (01:38)
At one point that's gone through

your head. and then I remember talking to our attorney at the time, our business attorney, and he's like, dude, you can't sell. You're not ready. Like, I'm ready. What do mean we can't sell? Yeah. Yeah. And you know, he, he was the one of the first ones who kind of really set me straight back then to go, ⁓ crap. There's a lot we have to do.

Alane Boyd (01:49)
I just set it into the world. I'm ready to sell.

Micah Johnson (02:04)
to even prepare for an exit, to prepare to sell, to prepare to hand it off to our kids, whatever the situation might be, even hiring a CEO to replace you. There's so much that needs to happen. And I think a lot of people just save that for the future. I'll do that some other time.

Alane Boyd (02:15)
Mm-hmm.

Or they're not, I think there's a naivety to thinking I'm gonna sell my company because I have something of worth, but they don't realize the amount of, I'll just say documentation that it takes to get to the point to sell. Yes, yes, but it's everything that luckily that we had already been doing a lot of that in place. think for...

Micah Johnson (02:39)
That's a bad word.

Alane Boyd (02:51)
some of what we had to do with leaving that company was letting go of relationships that we were holding. So there's like two sides to exiting your company and you not being in the day to day. One of it is you can't be the one that holds a majority of the knowledge or even your employees. Cause a company doesn't want to buy something that they can't continue to operate when you're not there or if a major employee leaves the company. So there's that side. And then there's that other side of

Micah Johnson (02:57)
Mm-hmm.

Alane Boyd (03:18)
Are you the salesperson? Are you the one that's continuously holding these relationships with the large accounts because we don't want you to leave and then, ⁓ now we're in trouble of losing this big client or multiple clients.

Micah Johnson (03:31)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. think, you know, focusing on how do you, how do you get out of the day to day? How do you not be the one person that knows how to do everything? Those relationships are going to come and go. But if I don't know, I don't know, tell me what you think, Alane, but I think saying all this out loud, if you can solve not being the roadblock and not being the person who knows how to do everything in the company, then you're.

already on a better path to delegation. You're already, you're being forced to document, you're being forced to automate, you're being forced to do all these things to offload that from you, making the second a lot easier because then, well, do you hold all the relationships? Ultimately, you'd love a scalable business where you don't hold any of the relationships and it's like the relationships with the brand.

Alane Boyd (04:04)
and

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, I agree with you. And some of that just thinking about my own experience where I was the holder of these multimillion dollar contracts that we had with the company and just thinking about, well, there was just so much of the nuance that I had in my head, even down to they signed a contract, but things changed later. And I knew that information and we never documented that information.

Micah Johnson (04:47)
I mean, clearly that only happened in our business. That's not happening anywhere else, yeah.

Alane Boyd (04:50)
Yeah, yeah, that kind of stuff. yeah, but our business.

So we had to even just get to where and we my my team used Pipedrive for everything we have sold a client, it went into Pipedrive as a one deal for that client, even if it was an add on to what they were already buying. That way, we had a true source of knowledge that was not Alane Boyd.

And eventually we hired somebody to replace me because you really got into this momentum of Alane, we are selling this company and we are going to do it in 12 months. And really putting that into place. And a part of that was we had already done so much in documentation, but there was this part of me that wasn't letting go of some stuff. And I had, that's what I had to do. I had to figure out a way to document those things so that when I left, it wasn't like a bandaid being ripped off of the relationship that

other people held that knowledge. Because that's why people liked me so much. I just knew everything. It isn't my charismatic personality.

Micah Johnson (05:45)
Well, I mean, I'm glad you're saying that facetiously. The, one of the things, if we are to deep dive into that a little bit, Alane, one of the things that again, just maybe it's just my perspective is I think things are in the other, I think things are in a different order than they used to be now with AI, with automation. And so now it's you, we talk about this in a lot of our episodes, but get workflows working manually.

Alane Boyd (06:14)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (06:15)
That's

always step one, get your business working, period. Step two, then start automating, start automating little bits of that over and over and over and build up systems. Then step three, document that automation. And then that's what's leading towards the ability to delegate, the ability to sell, the ability to transfer ownership of pieces, workflows, processes, systems. And I think before,

Alane Boyd (06:18)
Good job.

Micah Johnson (06:43)
We, while we did some automation, we didn't have the ability to automate like we do now. We certainly didn't have the ability to string up AI agents to do time saving things in a matter of a day and then leverage that, and then test it. And so, yeah, it's like, what is the right order right now to think about this breakdown of how do you go from.

Alane Boyd (06:59)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (07:10)
I run everything and people love me because I have all the knowledge to, I'm going to have an existential crisis because I don't know anything that's happening in the business because everybody is doing it for me.

Alane Boyd (07:11)
Thank you.

I think we're AI agents. We're doing a lot of stuff where you can record a video on how to do something. The agent turns that into an SOP. It automatically saves it in the right folder and drive or SharePoint or wherever where now that SOP gets saved in the right place.

in the right folder that it applies to. And then you have a RAG database hooked up to it so that anybody on your team can search and find that piece of knowledge when they need it. So we're seeing where this piece could be automated. where I see where I've had the biggest issue is how do you articulate the things that you just know by doing? You've done it for so long and where an AI agent could be that other person.

that can help you get that. So you could tell it what you're like, okay, this is the process. Just talk out loud, have it recorded transcript, let the agent tell you, okay, well, where did I miss things? Where were things unclear to create an SOP for?

Micah Johnson (08:25)
Hmm. Yeah, that's pretty interesting. And I mean, I thought you were going to go a different direction. Honestly, I thought you were going to say there's areas where people still need to have the judgment calls, still be able to have the human in the loop and the AI and automation is getting to a certain degree that's solving some problems. But your team is made up of the individuals that are making those decisions, those human decisions and relating to the outside.

you know, all the nuances, all the variables, all the changing market instances, all of those different things.

Alane Boyd (09:01)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (09:02)
So I think, Alane, when we talk about all of this, how do we put it into practice? How do we actually go, all right, whether I want to sell or not, where do I start? What do I do? I think a lot of this comes down to just acting like you're going to sell, whether you want to or plan to or not, because you never know what's going to happen. And think about, what do I need to do? Who do I need?

What automation do I need? What AI capabilities do I need to stay competitive? I don't want to lose my market share. I don't want to lose my edge. How do I keep the human element? But how do I not make every decision come down to me? And ultimately, if you could walk away for 90 days and you're not losing your business, you're in a really good spot.

Alane Boyd (09:52)
Yeah.

And there's no yeah, buts on that. Like, yeah, I could, but they would have to text me sometimes. Like, there's no yeah, buts. Like, no, can you leave for 90 days with complete silence? Your team cannot contact you. You are in a remote island with zero internet and cell service. A plane is going to drop you off and a plane is going to pick you up in 90 days. And so can you do that with no yeah, buts?

Micah Johnson (10:17)
I think that needs to be the name of this episode, No Yeah Buts.

Alane Boyd (10:22)
Maybe so, but that's really, that's what I hear a lot when people think that they're ready for things and they're like, yeah, I've been doing that, but I do have, okay, then you know, you're not there yet. You you've really got to have everything dialed in where you can leap. think for where, cause I think where a lot of founders kind of start to feel ⁓

insecure almost is like, then what is my purpose in this company? Well, it's whatever you want it to be. But if your end result is to have a vacation or to exit, then you need to find something that doesn't need make you part of the day to day. You can still lead your company, still lead the vision, but that you don't need to stay on for two years with a new company because you just gave yourself a new job.

Micah Johnson (11:08)
It's the same thing as a movie director. you know, as a movie director, you're making a lot of decisions. You have the vision. You're guiding the teams to produce an output, but you're not doing 100 % of the editing. You're not, you know, going down every single...

Alane Boyd (11:24)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (11:29)
Camera angle and then making people react it just to so you can get all this so you could be the cameraman for everything if that's how you're running the business now, that's got to stop I will say the place where you where it is exciting to be is that guidance part like I Have this vision I'm gonna start think strategically I can work with my leadership team to help me get through these

Alane Boyd (11:37)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (11:58)
questions, to get through these roadblocks, to get through these hard bumps in the road that we all face, that's so much better than doing it all by yourself.

Alane Boyd (12:08)
And that's when you can be replaced because the new company has their own vision, their own leadership that they come in and lead the company with theirs. They don't need you for that. So that's where you get to walk away and enjoy your retirement.

Micah Johnson (12:22)
And having that choice is, I think, the ultimate goal here. Whether you... Yeah, go ahead.

Alane Boyd (12:27)
That's what I think about,

like what I enjoy in the company and the stuff that I have fun with. And that's different between you and I. Like we can still be leaders in what is our strength and what we enjoy doing without overlapping and with still being able to future exit if we ever wanted to.

Micah Johnson (12:45)
Yeah, I would venture to say that what I enjoy doing is what you hate doing and sometimes vice versa.

Alane Boyd (12:50)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I

agree. Yeah, because I like doing literal fun things.

So when we started, when we had the topic for this, it was like how to use N8n to exit. So do you have any other things to circle back to like how to use the AI automation technology to help you get things into place that we already didn't say?

Micah Johnson (13:09)
Where we're at today with technology puts business owners, founders, co-founders, leadership teams in a completely different place than we've ever seen in the past. Because we have tools like N8n, because we have AI agents, because we have large language models, we're able to start constructing our own tools so quickly. like idea to execution. It may have been one of our earlier episodes, Alane, two years ago.

Alane Boyd (13:19)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (13:36)
When we started this podcast, or was it one year ago? I don't even remember. How long have we been doing this? Two years in May. That's right. Okay. So I think one of our earlier episodes, we talked about this concept of idea to execution, and eventually you have to get out of that execution mode because you can't scale teams going from idea to execution. It brings a bunch of headache and responsive, like just stress to your teams, but

Alane Boyd (13:42)
with two years in May.

Micah Johnson (14:06)
We may be eating our words a little bit with today's technology because a lot of founders and a lot of leaders can go from idea to execution. is, I've got an idea for something. Let me plug that into an AI. Let me create a prototype. Let me test this out. Let me try this AI agent. Let me try to figure this out. And it's like being a director with an immediate team, but then you have to translate that with your expertise. And so.

Being able to leverage all this technology to achieve the ability to have that choice, do I want to take myself out, yes or no? I don't know that it's any faster. It's different. It's still work. Whether it's documentation and you have an AI agent helping you document, you still got to have the knowledge to learn how to write the agents. You still got to have the knowledge to know what that output should be.

Alane Boyd (14:45)
The end.

Micah Johnson (15:00)
If you rely on AI to do everything, then you're still not going to be in a position because it's going to be mass confusion for anybody that's taking over your business or anybody that you're delegating things to.

Alane Boyd (15:08)
And then.

Yeah, I mean, when you're building an agent, for those that aren't familiar with that process, the agent itself as part of that automated workflow has instructions that you tell it. So if you don't give it the instructions from you're the expert or whoever it is on your team as expert, then it doesn't know what to do.

So thinking through this, there's definitely like some actionable items here for anybody that's thinking about exiting, even if it's five years from now and it's something in the future. And obviously a big one is documenting your processes because that has to be a part of the plan that you're giving somebody else. They have to know how to operate that company. Then also really looking at how agents can be utilized because the best part about agents is

Those are gonna run and that automation can continue to run without the people on the team to do those things necessarily. And so giving that over to a new company, they're also buying an asset, which are those automated workflows.

Micah Johnson (16:11)
that you and your team have designed, I would add to that. And that's what I see as like a critical edge moving forward in a lot of businesses. We talk about the moat that you have to protect yourself from competitors coming in and absorbing market share and different things like that. If everybody's using AI, it comes back down to workflows, processes, streamlining, efficiency, how much you support your team using these tools. ⁓

Alane Boyd (16:15)
Yes.

Micah Johnson (16:39)
And on the same side, still garbage in, garbage out. So if you have a bunch of crap going in and you're documenting a bunch of crap, you're going to have a bunch of crap coming out. And it is not going to be advantageous by any means. So yeah.

Alane Boyd (16:52)
We are really struggling to keep this conversation going. ⁓

Micah Johnson (16:53)
Yeah.

Alane Boyd (16:56)
I was thinking of something when you were saying that.

And obviously you have to prioritize what you're doing because you can't just go in and be like, we're documenting everything today. We're going to build agents today. There is a prioritization. We always say low effort, high impact. know, what are quick wins that you can do to build agents, not a 40 step workflow that is going to take a very long time to build out that agent. You can do a bunch of small agents that lead up to a bigger one. And then think about using something like that SOP agent that I was talking about where you have agents.

assist you in building the SOPs and then it's automatically putting it into your RAC database.

Micah Johnson (17:34)
And as a final note to all of this, I would add there is no detriment in learning how to do this stuff yourself. It's becoming a non-technical skill. And so even if you're hearing this going, well, I should hire somebody to do this. Yes, you should hire people on your team for sure. You should hire people to support you. But if you know the basics, Like Alane, you know how agents work. You.

can watch and see what they're doing. You can look at a log and go, I get what's happening. And you understand prompting. And you can put the building blocks together so that when you see a problem in the business, you go, I can solve that with an agent.

Alane Boyd (18:14)
Mm-hmm.

That's been the most valuable piece for me as a non-technical founder to have that education. I'm not going in and building agents, but I understand because I can, y'all showed me, I've gone through our own trainings and things so I can understand how an agent works because then I can go look at a problem or look at a situation and go, hey, let's build an agent on that. We can hook these things together. This is the input, this is the output. And that is so valuable for a founder or any leader that needs to have that vision.

and then have a team of builders that can go and execute.

Micah Johnson (18:49)
Yeah, absolutely. And if you were to just solve little problems over and over and over again, to your point a second ago, Alane, start small. It's like the little two node Lego blocks, right? Just keep building. You're going to have a great system.

Alane Boyd (19:00)
Mm-hmm.