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The driving forces for an emergency sale of a business, usually far below the fair market value are Disaster, Disease, Disability and Death. Sooner or later every owner leaves his or her business. If you wait long enough, one of these four horsemen of business apocalypse will claim your transition. Read More

Many owners are reluctant to plan for their departure from the business. In some cases it’s because they are too comfortable with ambiguity (see my previous post.) For others it is because they fear losing control. They believe that setting a final date for their departure, even tentatively, starts Read More

Ambiguity kills value. That was a key point in a white paper from Orange Kiwi that I read over the holidays. Taken from the PhD thesis of Dr. Allie Taylor, the paper describes the psychological profile of entrepreneurs, and their historical reluctance to begin an exit planning process. Read More

Your professional team is the fourth component of exit planning preparation. We’ve already discussed valuation, distance to goal and classes of buyers. Taken together, these basics aren’t enough by themselves to execute an exit plan, but understanding the first three and assembling the fourth will Read More

Know your buyer? Your initial reaction to this title may be “How can I know my buyer? I haven’t even decided to sell yet!” Nonetheless, understanding the type of buyer that your company will attract is vital. More importantly, gaining that understanding long before you go to market will impact many Read More

Once you understand your company’s value, the next step in planning is to calculate your Distance to Goal. As the Cheshire Cat said, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

“Any road” is not the way you want to approach the biggest financial event of a car Read More

When selling your business to employees or family, ownership lessons rise to a special level of importance. Regardless of the financial, inheritance, estate or valuation aspects of the plan, the real question is how to prepare your successors to run the company. Read More

Selling your business is much like selling a house. In order to realize the highest price possible, you want it to look its best. The other day I passed an independent gas station/convenience store. The marquee at the curb advertised their price for “unlead” gas. Really? Unleaded fuel has been Read More

Throughout their lives, baby boomers have had a profound impact on our society. One key reason for their large influence is the sheer size of their generation, which is estimated to be about 76 million people.

According to John Dini, a prominent exit planning strategist and author of t Read More

Design your business so that it requires more expensive employees. If low wage workers are the backbone of what you do, you risk losing the technology arms race with larger competitors. The population of business buyers is younger, more technologically savvy, and less inclined to long hours than th Read More