CREEL PRICE – 109 Million Reasons to Exit

Jack Delosa speaks with Creel Price about how he built and sold a business for $109m.

From scaling some of the highest mountains in the world, to meetings with Richard Branson, exiting his business for over $100m to more recently captaining Australia in the World Elephant Polo Championships, he is the high octane adventurer at the forefront of what he now calls the “entreprenaissance”.

Starting his business at the age of 25 with $5,000, Creel built Blueprint Management Group to 1000 staff and within a decade sold the business for over $100 million. However Creel’s business advice remains profoundly simple.

“Business has become too complex.” Creel explains. “But it doesn’t have to be. There are so many components that can overwhelm entrepreneurs. They’ve got to do the finance, HR, marketing, sales…there’s just so many things that can overwhelm you but the role of an entrepreneur can be a lot simpler than that.”

Creel sees the role of the entrepreneur as being the ability to find and engage good people. “If you can actually get your people to have confidence in what their role is, they can really become successful…rather than you the entrepreneur needing to know everything.”
He simplifies the different management styles required for each phase by breaking the business life cycle into three stages.

1. The Income Stage. How do I generate enough income to pay the bills, and eventually pay myself my market salary?
2. The Profit Stage.  How do we build a model that is scalable, allowing us to drive revenue and profits?
3. The Value Stage. How do we create a solid business that is ready for sale? In the value stage it stops being about expansion so much and starts being about de-risking the business.

Creel encourages entrepreneurs to start with the end in mind, he draws on lessons learnt from when he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. “The goal in mountain climbing is not to get to the top of the mountain, it’s actually to get to the top and back down safely and that’s where it parallels business.” He argues it’s not enough for entrepreneurs to know to how to build a big business, it’s also about succession and exiting that business, something the vast majority of entrepreneurs neglect to fully understand.

“One of two things is going to happen, either you’re going to outgrow your business or your business is going to outgrow you.” Creel calls this “the entrepreneurs curse” and explains “entrepreneurs can get so excited about an opportunity, but then they fall out of love with it, and so they move on to the next opportunity. Unless the entrepreneurs builds the business to a point where they can sell it, they can get stuck.”

Alternatively, the organisation will grow to a point where the entrepreneur is no longer the best person to be sitting in the chair. “Entrepreneurs are great at coming with an idea, innovating and building it to a certain stage, but then sometimes they have to realise that the business has moved beyond their skill-set.” At this point he advises the entrepreneur step aside from the role of CEO and become a non-executive director, putting someone with greater management experience at the helm.

Aside from the personality traits of an entrepreneur, Creel explains that it is also financially beneficial to eventually sell the business. “You can earn an income working for someone else and you can earn an income working in a business, but it’s sort of capped. Whereas when you build up equity value within a business, you can make a substantial return because someone’s willing to pay a multiple of your income, so you can bring some of those future earnings forward.”

An example of this may be a business that is doing $2m profit, and is valued at a multiple of 5 times its profit, achieving a sale price of $10m.

Creel emphasizes that in order to achieve the highest possible price in the sale of a business, it is important that the entrepreneur is no longer there. “Succession plan. The business is worth a huge amount more if the entrepreneur isn’t in the business.” This is about systemising the business to a point where it is scalable, and eventually putting in place a board of management to manage the business.

Today Creel has several ventures that are about encouraging this movement. He educates entrepreneurs of all ages starting at the age of 10 with his Kidpreneur Programs, right up to high-profiled entrepreneurs with his “Add a Zero Program”. To be involved in the movement visit www.creelprice.com .