One constant of successful companies is a stable, motivated management team. This quality not only contributes to corporate success, it is also key to increasing the value of your business and your successful business exit.
Should you decide to sell your business to a third party, you’ll discover that potential buyers place significant value on the [...]

The necessity of having a trained and motivated management team in place before and after you leave the company cannot be overstated. In the eyes of a buyer, a business has little value if its owner’s departure means the new owner must reinvent the wheel. So it is with systems. Once you are gone, can [...]

Let’s review the four areas where business owners who want to both survive in today’s economic climate and emerge from it poised for growth (or sale) can focus their energies. As you may recall, those areas are:

Preserving and Protecting Value
Identifying Value and Cash Flow
Creating Revenue
Creating Value

Most owners are currently waist-deep in the first area: cutting [...]

In previous posts, we have discussed importance of value drivers: the intrinsic characteristics of a company that buyers look for when deciding what company to buy and how much to pay. We’ve talked about how important value drivers are in a successful sale and consequently how it is the work of the owner (not employees) [...]

Business owners may be telling their advisors things like, “I’d like to back away from my business”, “I’d like the freedom to do whatever I want, whenever I want”, “I don’t want to worry about money. But if I sell, I’m unlikely to get enough cash in today’s merger and acquisition marketplace.”, “If I could [...]

Near the end of 2008, we noted that the economic downturn had forced many owners to postpone their plans to exit their companies. We then looked at the several actions owners could take to respond to that delay:

Ride out the storm doing one’s best to protect value.
Use the time to build business value.
Avoid the delay [...]

Previously I outlined the four characteristics of a successful Employee Incentive Plan. Namely, such plans should:

Be specific, not arbitrary, and be in writing;
Be tied to performance standards;
Make substantial bonuses; and
Handcuff the key employee to the business.

Here I will focus on the last characteristic; handcuffing the key employees to the business. The goal of the handcuff [...]

What’s the point?
“I want to install a bonus plan for my key employees to reward them for their performance.”
“One of my best employees left last week for a company for more money. I think I’d better install a good bonus plan to stay competitive in the marketplace.”
These are just a few of the comments I’ve [...]

In an economy when many of us are tempted to bury our heads until the shooting is over, smart business owners are realizing that this may be the perfect time to acquire smaller, less adaptable, less capitalized or less well-managed competitors.
As the sellers of goods or services, owners sometimes forget that they, too, can be [...]