Ultimately, your ability to get top dollar for your company may depend on your ability to create an employee incentive plan that will motivate and keep good management. An important characteristic of any successful incentive plan is that key employees earn the incentive bonus based on a performance standard that, when attained, increases the value [...]

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 [...]

Fictional owner, Peter Miller, had called his accountant to ask her to help him value his business with the idea of retiring in a few years. No stranger to Exit Planning, his accountant assembled all of Peter’s advisors and launched a complete Exit Planning process. She began, not with an examination of how a transfer [...]

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 [...]

Business owners must meet the challenges presented by recent changes in the economy. What can we learn from owners and their advisors across the U.S. about which strategies are most effective? We invite you to share stories about how your company has been affected and how you are responding.
General Observations
Owners, who ran tight ships when [...]

The current recession has given all business owners, quite literally, pause: pause in growth, pause in hiring, pause to reconsider exactly where our companies are heading — or need to head — if we are to meet our owner-based goals.
I have discussed the many benefits of using the time afforded by today’s economic downturn to [...]

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) [...]

Assuming that all business owners (except for those forced to liquidate) will eventually sell or transfer their companies, attention is often focused on how to be a well-prepared seller. Setting exit objectives, making the appropriate choice of business entity (C or S Corporation), building business value and selecting a skilled Team of Advisors are some [...]

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 [...]