About you

If you're reading this the chances are you're a forward thinking person with a vision to do something significant over the next 3 years.

If you're already a successful business person, entrepreneur, leader and/or strategist - and you own or work for a fast growing entrepreneurial company with great potential - then it is worth a few minutes of your time to talk with us here at 3YearsOut.

We're great listeners - we ask powerful and insightful questions - and we almost always see growth opportunities most people miss.

Your vision

Does this sound familiar?

You built your company by thinking ahead, making bold decisions, by leading the pack and by acting strategically. You might have even been 5-10 years ahead of the market at times. 

Perhaps today you have a nice 'solid' business which thinks and acts 6-12 months ahead most of the time. Most of your focus is on simply managing the business you've created.  It feels as if it takes all the collective energy and resource in the business just to stay on that course.

You don’t want to defocus the core business, but deep down you know you must keep innovating and creating within the business to at least keep your edge. You know the world is moving faster every day and if you don’t keep pace then you’ll wear the consequences.

Secretly you might even long for those earlier days when you felt the freedom and exhiliration of an early stage business.

Deep down you know 3 things:

1. There’s an ocean of emerging businesses and trends out there eating at your market.  To make your current business sustainable and set the platform to keep growing strongly you need to continue to stay ahead of the market curve
    
2. There’s at least one big piece of strategic value lying idle inside your business - that you’d love to get it out.  It could be worth an awful lot but you simply don’t have the time and resources to realise it
    
3. You want to exit the business one day, to retire and play golf or whatever it is you love to do when you’re not working.  But before that can happen you have to get the business ready to optimise the outcome of all the years (or decades) its taken you to get this far.  And when you do, you need the experts to help you because this one event is the biggest in your business life.

That’s where 3YearsOut comes in.  With our unique partnering model we can show you how to achieve the last major step that your business needs to truly reach its potential. In fact we won't just show you - we'll be there alongside you to see the process through.

The stakes

This next step is the most important point in your business life, and therefore probably your own.

Let’s say your company is worth $10m right now.  Before the recession it might have been worth $20m, but the market has punished valuations over the last 12 months and they’re not coming back in a hurry. 

Let’s say you’ve spent 20 years of hard work to build your company to its current form.  That means that your time was worth something like $2,000/working day.

Now let’s imagine it was possible to double the value of the outcome, and double the chance of achieving it smoothly (quite important in the current market) over the next three years.  If that is possible then will be making > $20,000/working day (tax free). 

You have probably paid a solid price for your success to date, via the burdens on your health, your spare time, your family and your relationships.  Let’s make it worth it.

The next stage of your business is the critical one.  It’s like 2011 for the All Blacks.  All these years of preparation, of winning form, but of heartbreak when it really mattered.

The reality is that its crunch time.

And the next stage is a whole new game.  What you want now is the best people you can get, people who have done this before, and who understand your business, your culture, your environment.

You don’t want people who are specialists in big companies, but you do want the level of quality which comes with this environment.

Protection

Good entrepreneurs are often optimists.  Hence the focus is on the upside rather than the potential downside.  Companies such as Navman, Trademe, Icebreaker etc show us what is possible and we think every company can make it to this point.

But the reality is that 95%+ of mid sized companies fail to realise their potential, often by a long way.  This is because reality is always far more complicated and unpredictable than we ever imagine.

The key to success is to balance day to day management with great strategic planning and execution.  Doing this protects the asset that you’ve spent so many years building, and ensures you actually reach your goals.