Blair Koch honed her skills in marketing, sales and product management at IBM, General Motors, EDS and several highly successful startups. In 2000, she left behind her corporate career for life as a consultant. After several years, she found herself looking for a venture that would complement her consulting business. An associate told her about The Alternative Board and in 2005 she took the plunge and became a franchisee.
As she recalls, “I liked that I didn’t need to figure out the business model. One of the beauties of a good franchise organization is that it is a repeatable, scalable model.” Although she never dreamed that TAB would become her primary focus, today her franchise, TAB Denver West, has seven boards, which Koch hopes to continue to expand. In order to grow the business, as well as prepare for her eventual exit, Koch has established a partnership model.
“I tried using contract facilitators for business growth but that didn’t work for me,” she says. “I wanted to work with people who had ‘skin in the game.’ This is what led me to a partner model whereby partners buy-in to the business and own a piece.”
Koch developed the partnership model, including finance, marketing and legal considerations, as well as envisioning what the ideal partner would look like. Then the challenge was to find someone who would give her thoughtful, but unproven plan a chance. “Once I had one partner in place and was able to show that the model worked, bringing other partners onboard has been relatively easy, domino like,” she says.
Koch’s goal is to bring in multiple partners, each owning up to 10% of the business. It is important to Koch that she maintains majority control. She has a clear vision of where she wants to take the business. Bringing in partners also allows the majority owner to receive passive income from parts of her business.
Her first partner joined three years ago. Since then, she’s had several, most of which came from her personal network (the other answered an ad on BuyBizSell). Koch says the vetting process for each partner takes an average of 9-12 months, including lots of one-on-one time with her and the other partners, behavioral assessments and job benchmarking, attending board meetings and coaching sessions, etc.
Koch isn’t sure when she’ll be ready to exit or how much involvement she will continue to have with the business when that day comes. For now, she is continuing to grow her membership and look for qualified partners.
Her advice for others considering selling their TAB franchise? Know what you want and prepare for it ahead of time, because it will take time. Also, determine what type of person you are targeting to buy the business – is it a current TAB facilitator? Someone who has a successful consulting business who wants the cache of being able to say they facilitate boards? Or someone who wants to make it a full-time career? These are important questions to be able to answer so that you can position the sale correctly.
