When a buyer evaluates your business, they are looking at the obvious things. Revenue. Margin. Growth trajectory. Customer concentration. Operational systems. All of it matters, and all of it will be scrutinized during due diligence. But there is something else that drives premium valuations - something that does not appear on a balance sheet and cannot be manufactured in the months before a sale. It is community.

I do not mean followers. I do not mean an email list. I mean a genuine, loyal, emotionally connected group of people who trust your brand, talk about it to their friends, and come back year after year because they feel like they belong to something. That is the asset most founders underestimate, and it is often the asset that makes a buyer pick up the phone in the first place.

Julie Cole, co-founder of Mabel's Labels, is one of the clearest examples of this I have come across. When Avery Labels called in 2016, they were there for more than labels. They could make labels. What they could not make - what would have taken them years and millions of dollars to build - was the community of moms who loved Mabel's Labels, who trusted the brand, and who had been following it since the early days of mom blogs and Facebook groups.

Julie and her three co-founders started building that community before community building had a name. In the early 2000s, there were no playbooks for this. There were no influencer strategies or social media managers. Julie was one of the original mom bloggers. She showed up at parenting conferences. She connected with other moms online and in person. She gave before she asked for anything in return. And she did it consistently, year after year, for over a decade.

By the time Avery came calling, Mabel's Labels was a company with a deep, ongoing, trust-based relationship with its market. That is what the buyer wanted. The brand, the loyalty, and the community that powered both.

This is something I think about in my wealth advisory practice, because I see the other side of this equation too often. I sit across from business owners who have built solid companies with good revenue and reasonable margins, but who have no brand identity that exists independently of them. Their customers are loyal to the founder, not to the business. Their reputation lives in personal relationships, not in a brand that a buyer can acquire and sustain. And when it comes time to discuss an exit, that distinction matters enormously.

A business with strong personal relationships but no transferable brand is a risk for a buyer. The moment the founder leaves, the relationships are at risk. The customer base is at risk. The referral engine is at risk. But a business with a community - a brand that people identify with and return to regardless of who is running operations - that is an asset a buyer can build on. That is what commands a premium.

Julie made a point on my podcast that stuck with me. She said the acquiring company did not want to take over Mabel's Labels and make it theirs. They wanted to ride the coattails of what had already been built. Every mom already knew Mabel's Labels. The brand had credibility, warmth, and trust baked into it. That is not something you can replicate with a marketing budget and six months of effort. That is the result of showing up, authentically, for years.

And here is the part that matters for founders who are still in the building phase. Community is not a nice-to-have that you layer on top of a good product. It is a value driver that compounds over time - and it is one of the hardest things for a competitor to replicate. Julie described how Mabel's Labels has continuously followed its audience from platform to platform - from blogs to Facebook to Instagram to Reddit, and now experimenting with nano influencers and new engagement models. The product itself, labels, looks deceptively simple. But the business is a high-tech e-commerce operation that has adapted to every shift in consumer behaviour for over two decades. The reason they could adapt is that they were never chasing an audience. Instead, they were walking alongside one.

The lesson here is that the relationship between your business and its market is an asset, and it should be treated like one. The lesson is If your customers would notice and care if your brand disappeared tomorrow, you have something valuable. If they would simply move on to the next provider without a second thought, you have a transaction business, not a brand business. Both can be profitable. But they do not sell for the same multiple.

So the questions I would put to any founder is this: what are you building beyond the product? Are you creating something people feel connected to, or are you simply delivering a service they happen to use? Are your customers loyal to the business, or loyal to you personally? And if a buyer were to look at your company tomorrow, would they see a community they want to be part of or a client list that could evaporate the moment you walk away?

Julie Cole has stayed at Mabel's Labels for a decade after the exit. She stayed because she loves the brand and because the brand still benefits from her presence. But the business does not depend on her the way it once did. It has a general manager, a marketing team, a digital team, and a community that has its own momentum. That is what a transferable brand looks like. Julie built something that could hold its shape after she let go of it and that is precisely why someone was willing to pay for it.

If you are building a business and you have not thought deliberately about brand, community, and transferability, it is worth starting now. And if you want to understand how those assets connect to your eventual exit, book a one-on-one Wealth Gap Analysis with me. We will look at what your business is worth today, what a buyer would actually be paying for, and where the gaps are between what you have built and what you need.

Reach out on LinkedIn - Colleen O’Connell-Campbell - or email me.

TTFN (ta ta for now)

Colleen

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