I just finished Built to Sell by John Warrillow. It’s one of those books that gets recommended to founders so often it almost feels cliché. “Make your business sellable,” they say. Sounds obvious, right?
Except most of us don’t build that way. We build to survive, to ship, to make payroll. Then one day, someone asks, “What’s your exit plan?” and you realize your entire business is just you duct-taping things together at 2 AM.
So what hit me hardest reading it? Not the fairy tale story arc he uses, but the underlying mechanics that make a company valuable when you step out of the equation.
Lesson 1: Services Don’t Scale (At Least Not How You Think)
Warrillow hammers this point: if your business depends on you selling bespoke services, congratulations. You’ve built yourself a job. A well-paying job maybe, but not an asset.
I’ve seen this in practice. Service shops look shiny on the surface, but try selling one and you’ll get laughed out of the room. Buyers don’t want your “relationships” or your “custom process.” They want repeatability. They want a product.
So what’s the play? Productize the service. Standardize what you deliver, package it, price it clearly, and make it teachable to someone who isn’t you. That shift from “we sell time” to “we sell a repeatable outcome” turns a founder-dependent hustle into something real.
Lesson 2: Process Is the Product
You can’t scale chaos. If your team needs to Slack you at midnight to figure out how to deliver on a client promise, you’re dead in the water. Warrillow’s fictional agency founder learns to create process manuals so the machine runs without him.
Here’s the kicker: the manuals aren’t about micromanaging, they’re about de-risking. When a buyer looks at your company, what they see is a set of repeatable systems that spit out money. No systems, no sale.
As I like to say: make it work, make it work well, then make it pretty. Most of us get stuck at “make it work” and never actually codify the “well.”
Lesson 3: Diversify Your Pipeline, Not Your Offer
One of the big mistakes Warrillow points out: agencies that do everything for everyone. Sound familiar? “Oh sure, we do web, mobile, SEO, PPC, branding, content, and also maybe we’ll paint your office if you ask nicely.”
It feels smart in the moment (“we’ll never run out of work if we say yes to everything”) but it’s a death trap. You stretch your people thin, you confuse the market, and you become completely unsellable.
The antidote is focus. Specialize so deeply that customers come to you for one thing, and you do it so well they’d be insane to pick anyone else. That’s when sales scale. That’s when referrals compound. That’s when a buyer starts circling.
Lesson 4: You’re Probably the Bottleneck
This one stings. The main character in the book literally can’t sell his business because he is the business. Every sale, every delivery, every client touchpoint goes through him. Sound familiar? Yeah, I hated that chapter too.
The uncomfortable truth is: if you want a sellable business, you have to fire yourself from as many roles as possible. Sales, ops, product, delivery: all of it. Otherwise you’re just selling your calendar, and nobody’s buying that.
The Macro Takeaway
Built to Sell isn’t really about selling. It’s about building something durable, transferable, and independent of your heroic founder energy. Whether you ever sell or not, those are the businesses that last.
So the next time I’m tempted to duct-tape one more “custom client request” into the codebase, I’ll remind myself: am I building a company here, or just another job for myself? Because one is an asset, and the other is a treadmill.
Data over opinions.
The Built to Sell Founder’s Scorecard
Enough theory. Let’s make this practical. Here’s a scorecard you can run through to see if you’ve built an asset or just a founder-dependent treadmill.
| Area | Diagnostic Question | Red Flag (0 pts) | Work in Progress (1 pt) | Healthy (2 pts) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Offer | Is your service/product standardized? | Everything is custom, every client is unique | Some repeatable elements, but lots of exceptions | Clear, defined package that’s delivered the same way every time |
| Process | Can someone else deliver without you? | You’re the only one who knows how things get done | Docs exist, but still lots of tribal knowledge | Clear SOPs, playbooks, and training that anyone can follow |
| Sales | Who closes deals? | Only you | You and one other | Dedicated sales process/team independent of founder |
| Revenue Mix | How predictable is revenue? | Purely project-based, starts at $0 every month | Some recurring/repeat work | High % of recurring/subscription contracts |
| Positioning | How broad is your market offering? | “We do everything for anyone” | Narrowing, but still lots of one-offs | Clear niche, laser-focused positioning |
| Pipeline | Where do leads come from? | Your personal network | Mix of referrals and ad hoc marketing | Repeatable, measurable lead gen engine |
| Dependency | What happens if you step away for 3 months? | The company dies | Things limp along, revenue drops | Business continues to operate smoothly |
| Valuation Signal | Would a buyer pay for this today? | No (it’s a job, not a business) | Maybe, but risky | Yes (it’s a transferable, de-risked asset) |
Scoring:
- 0-5: You’ve built yourself a nice treadmill. It pays, but it’s not sellable.
- 6-11: You’re in “transitional” territory. Some assets are there, but you’re still founder-dependent.
- 12-16: Congrats, you’ve built an actual business, not just a hustle. Buyers would care.
The Punchline
The trick isn’t getting a perfect score tomorrow. It’s picking one or two of those red flags and systematically fixing them. Turn custom work into packages. Write down the process. Teach someone else to sell. Each step makes the business less you and more itself.
Because the real test of Built to Sell isn’t whether you exit. It’s whether the thing you built can survive without you constantly duct-taping it together.