If You Aren’t Building to Sell, You’re Running in Circles

How to Create a Life + Business
You Love with Exit Planning

It’s time for us to dive into the wild and strange and fulfilling waters of exit planning. Building with the end in mind, as I like to think of it.

Now, before you tune out and think, ‘Oh! This isn’t for me!’, I’m asking you to stay with this until the end. Because the B-I-G secret is that exit planning isn’t just for big businesses. And it isn’t even just for business.

It’s for every one of us who want our lives to matter and mean something.

And I know that that’s everyone here. Because you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want a meaningful, missional, miracle-filled, magical life, would you?

Exactly. Of course you want that kind of life.

How Does Exit Planning Help?

Exit planning is looking at ‘x’ and asking “What will this be like at the end of this cycle?”

What’s ‘x’?

Your life, business, marriage, or your parenting. In fact, it’s any part of your life that is important to you.

What will it look like in 5, 10, 20, 50 years?

It’s taking the long view and asking:

Will it matter?

Will it last?

Do I care?

Why?

Those questions are where I always start my work with my clients. Why? Because we have to care – deeply – about what we’re building. We have to have a Vision for what we’re doing.

If we don’t have that Vision, we won’t be motivated enough to do the work that needs to be done to create a life / business that lasts and meets our needs now and in the future.

We Live in a ‘Right Now’ Focused Culture

Make no mistake about it, this is deeply counter-cultural. We live in a world that encourages us to live for the moment, like the grasshopper. Or, even worse, to live through the lives of celebrities and sports figures and ignore our own lives.

Media convinces us to be afraid ALL the time. It wants us to obsess over grisly, disturbing, and ultimately trivial details. It coaxes us to believe that everything is wrong and bad and violent.

We’re constantly told that being active agents of change and goodness in our own lives is pointless. Ultimately, we’re told that it’s simply not worth the time, money, and energy to create something amazing.

Brené Brown, in her brilliant work on shame and vulnerability, calls it numbing. And whether we numb with drugs, alcohol, shopping, sex, sugar, or reality TV, we live in a culture obsessed with not being ‘present’ to the real at all costs.

Most people spend their lives running really hard and being really busy and having a LOT of drama because that is all they know to do. When your focus is on the details of ‘right now’ they get blown up. They become monstrously large atrocities that command all our attention. They become Drama, with a capital ‘D’.

Get a Birds-Eye View with Exit Planning

Exit planning is all about getting up and out of the details. Like an osprey soaring high above the water, we get a new and larger perspective. We want to see beyond the current chaos to where we’re headed. We determine if we’re okay with the current direction or if we need to take action now to change.

(Which, by the way, is another SUPER counter-cultural thing to do. To decide that you have responsibility for your life. That you have power in your life and that you can change your life… now.)

When I start working with my clients, one of the first steps is always ‘triage’. In triage we put your biggest concerns and problems on the table to figure out what’s ‘going on in there’. Then, we take quick, decisive action to ‘stop the bleeding’.

Employee issues. Marriage issues. Health issues. The things that keep us up at night and steal our joy… we look at those. We dig in and figure out plans of action to bring down the levels of chaos and crisis.

Get Your Life + Business Out of Crisis

That’s triage. And triage has to happen at the beginning. It’s pretty much impossible to focus on building your dream when your world is falling apart. Dealing with the chaos might feel like it will take forever, but there’s good news. Triage is usually just the first couple of months of our time together.

Together, we bring the chaos into the light. Make the big decisions. Create new processes and systems. And, we keep moving. Inch by inch. Baby step by baby step.

Once we handle triage, we move on to the gap analysis, which I’ll talk about in Part 2.

Ready to radically transform the way you see the world?

To wrap your hands around the tools of power and build a life that is truly extraordinary?

Ready to have it stop hurting so darn bad?

You’re here to build a better world and we’re here to help.

Love what you’re reading? Pin it!

It makes life so much easier. 😍

Vanessa Long

Vanessa Long is creator of the Seasons of Success and author of Discovering Your Passionate Purpose. Focused on providing straight-forward, no b.s. solutions, strategies, and support to move you from where you are to where you yearn to be. It’s time to tap into your purpose and build a life that expresses all of who you were designed to be.