You can not believe it! You decide to sell your business and the next day it seems that half the city knows you are trying to sell. What affect will that information have on your employees, vendors competitors and customers?
This is a real concern once you decide to sell. The next thing you know is [...]

So what if you’ve never sold a business before? You know what you want from the sale of yours. You know your business better than anyone else. Who better to lead the charge than you?
Don’t mislead yourself. You may be the worst possible person to sell your company.
Why? You may be the person most attached [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“Why do I need to create multiple entities to protect my assets?” Steve Pierce, owner of Pierce Floral Shops, asked. “I already have all of my business interests in a Limited Liability Company. Doesn’t that protect me and my business?”
The answer provided by his lawyer was about what you would expect. “Yes. And no.”
Putting all [...]

We have all heard the old proverb that it’s dangerous to put all of your eggs in one basket.” But does the proverb apply in the world of business ownership? Specifically, is it a valid warning or just a worn-out cliché? It seems to make good sense to concentrate all of your business effort and [...]