Sell the business??
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@scottalanmiller said in Sell the business??:
@Dashrender said in Sell the business??:
It's likely not really worth much at all, it might be worth 1 year income at best
OMG, no way. Maybe 1/1000th of a year's net income, tops.
Think of it this way. Let's say his contract bring in $100K a year. You have at least a 50% chance of the customer cancelling the account on the first day, and at least a 5% chance of them cancelling every calendar year after that, just the churn of vendors, and a 10% chance of the customer just going out of business (this happens way more than you'd guess) and/or being bought by someone with their own internal IT already (we see this about once a week in our customer pool.)
So you PAY a year's salary for the "right" to work a job for the amount of that salary.... that means that you'd have to work a lifetime with that client to "approach" earning as much as you'd likely earn from just working a normal employment job. Paying a year's salary out in advance to "buy the job" means you have this massive loss of investment to recoup and no means of recouping it because you didn't buy a functional company but just the right for you to work a job.
So even if the customer was guaranteed to never leave, ever, it would be unlikely to be worth anywhere near one year's income to buy the right to work that job. Add in the near certainty that the customer will leave you in the next five to ten years and there's no real possibility of ever making it make sense financially.
And unlike a normal job where you get raises, promotions, new opportunities, you are tied to the one job you bought up front.
I'm glossing over lots of potential opportunities that buying a contract can have, but they are mostly super high risk or pie in the sky that is so unlikely that you can't put money down on it.
I did say MIGHT.... i agree, the likeliness that it's worth anything is extremely low...
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@IRJ said in Sell the business??:
I did say to hand over documentation. It sounds like he doesn't even have that. We all agree that documentation is his job.
For sure, that's the core of the job more than anything else.
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Thanks everyone for the input, it has helped with a few things.
There is documentation to hand over, it does need some updating which is what I'm doing.
Let's forget selling the business, I've thought more about this and realise it is something that won't happen.
Wondering what others think of this? How much responsibility should the client take / should have taken, for them not to have ended up in this situation?
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@siringo said in Sell the business??:
Thanks everyone for the input, it has helped with a few things.
There is documentation to hand over, it does need some updating which is what I'm doing.
Let's forget selling the business, I've thought more about this and realise it is something that won't happen.
Wondering what others think of this? How much responsibility should the client take / should have taken, for them not to have ended up in this situation?
it's completely on them. They choose their IT support.
