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Timing Your Business Exit or Sale (Part 1 of 3)

If you want to do a business exit or sale at the “right” time, then it requires being properly prepared to enter the market when these three conditions exist:

  1. The economy is expanding
  2. Your business is growing
  3. You are ready personally and financially

If you have survived the recession, stabilized your business, and are setting your sights on a healthy retirement, now is the time to begin focusing on these three targets. Let us first consider timing your business exit or sale during an expanding economy.

Looking at the past thirty years, we have seen the market start down at the beginning of each decade, run up to a peak, and then crash by the beginning of the next.

1980’s Started in recession – experienced unprecedented job/GDP growth – crashed with Savings & Loan debacle.
1990’s Started in recession – grew through globalization and technology – crashed with the internet bubble burst.
2000’s Started in recession – grew with low interest and inflation – ended with real estate market crash.
2010’s Started in recession – with 7.5 years to go?

While it is difficult to predict the future, we could assume that this decade and the next could cycle up and down much like the previous decades. If this holds true, you want to consider your timing during an expanding economy to be within a few years of 2015 or 2025.

Many of the owners I am working with today, I first met between 2004 and 2008. They invited me in to talk because they suspected it was a good time to consider a sale. Those that waved off the opportunity during that expanding economy and period of business growth did so because they were simply not personally ready.

As we discuss the recent past and look towards the future, they feel a little more anxiety about focusing on their timing. I understand why.

In the last decade, they were only 45 to 55 years old and feeling a little too young to retire. In this decade, they will be 55 to 65 years old, and they realize that by the middle of the next decade they will be 65 to 75 years old.

As we work towards growing their business from here, and recognize that economic forces could once again negatively affect their value in ten years from today, we are diligently focusing on preparing for readiness by 2015.

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6 Tricks to Sell Yourself by Geoffrey James

A few months ago, we posted a blog about selling yourself to business buyers – Tips for Business Buyers: Sell Yourself – from Nick Rodites of Bankers Advocate.  Today, I will be sharing some ways to sell yourself to the customer by Geoffrey James from Inc.com.

In every sales situation, your No. 1 job is to sell yourself to the customer. Here’s how.

Before anybody is going to buy from you or your company, they’ve got to “buy” the idea that you’re somebody worth working with. In other words, just like a job candidate, your first task is always to sell yourself. Here are a few ways to go about it.

1. Research the Target
Before visiting a customer, examine the company’s website. Notice how they communicate about themselves, how they view their market, and whom they see as their primary customers. Use Wikipedia and other online resources (like Hoovers.com) to learn the basics and the background of the industry and market. Then use LinkedIn and online news stories to learn about key individuals in the hiring firm, especially those working in sales and marketing.
2. Create a Story
At some point in the relationship, the customer is going to want to know what you’re all about.  The best way to give an impression of who you are is to tell a personal story about some event in your life that inspired your interest in what you’re selling: that is, your company and your products.
For example, if you own a chemical wholesaler, start your story with the chemistry set that you had as a kid and explain how you’ve always been fascinated by how the chemical industry works.
3. Anticipate Inevitable Questions
Before buying, a  customer will want to know specifics about what you and your firm has accomplished.  “Tell detailed accomplishment stories that clearly illustrate the … challenge, what [you] did about it, what results [you] produced,” says Ford R. Myers, author of the newly published. Get the Job You Want, Even When No One’s Hiring.
4. Be a Professional
At the risk of stating the obvious, you don’t have a second chance to make a first impression. If your meeting with a customer is face to face, get lots of rest the night before, wear your best clothes, leave plenty of time for traffic, and arrive at least 10 minutes early.
Just before the interview starts, take a deep breath and focus on the task at hand. That’s not “making the sale,” but rather determining whether your offering actually matches the customer’s wants and needs.
5. Ask Thoughtful Questions
Never ask questions that could be answered with a little research on the Web.  Instead, ask questions, and start conversations, that build on the research that you accomplished in Step 1–and which illustrate your business acumen.  Provide relevant examples of what you and your firm have accomplished in the past, and tie them into the requirements of the current situation.
6. Close on Next Steps
As the meeting comes to its conclusion, establish the way forward.  In most situations, this will be another meeting or some form of communication.  Most importantly, you must follow up immediately on any commitment that you’ve made. A prompt follow-up tells your customer that you’ll do what’s necessary to make them more successful–without forcing them to wait for you.

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Business Acquisition Checklist

“When you buy a company, you are not buying a building or the employees but you are really buying the customers.”
Planning of acquiring a business? There are a couple of things you definitely need to know before you sign that check.

Inc Magazine lists the things you will need to consider before acquiring a business. Some of these helpful tips include:

  • Doing your own due diligence and having your own team when doing it to ensure that every nook and cranny of the business acquisition is explored
  • Assessing what the new business will do to your bottom line. ideally, buying a business should compliment your current organization’s bottom line.
  • Determining the other advantages of buying the business. Are you buying out a competitor from the marketplace? Or is this business acquisition going to build a barrier to entry for other competitors?

Additionally, you will also need to determine the customers of the new business. After all, buying a company means that you are buying their customers.

Here are the tips that you need to keep in mind.
Read more…

Ready to enter business ownership? Bankers Advocate is here to help. We have served our clients for over 20 years in Exiting and Entering Business Ownership.

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Successful Start-up: Make People Care

Kevin Ready, a serial entrepreneur, consultant, and author of the book Startup: An Insider’s Guide to Launching and Running a Business shared on Forbes.com some tips to have a successful start-up:

It can be a lonely world out there.  During the first days and weeks when you are just starting a new business, it can feel like you are alone in the wilderness.

When consulting with entrepreneurs that are struggling to get a business off the ground, I often end up telling them this:
I read a great book on starting your own business. It’s the most important book on the subject you could ever read—and it only had two words in it.

Those two words were “nobody cares.”

To close the story and make the point, I tell them that as an entrepreneur, your entire job is to make those two tiny, awful words wrong.

That’s it. Make people care about what you are doing.

The fact of the matter is that at first, people won’t care. People are busy. People won’t know who you are when you start out, and they won’t go out of their way to find out. As you create a business and move beyond your product to the point where you are figuring out how to connect your product with the market, you realize that the whole purpose behind your effort is to get people to care about what you do. If you are in the computer business, it is not just about computers. If you are in the pizza business, it is not just about pizza. The best product in the world is just a starting point, and it won’t make you a dollar unless you can figure out how to make that product relevant to the lives of your customers and get them to under­stand that relevance. Having a great product helps, but that alone is not enough.

This bias toward customer indifference is a reality of the market. But to tell you the truth, I like the fact that getting into markets is tough because that means that it is tough for my competitors too, and will serve to keep the folks in your market that aren’t smart enough or fast enough from hogging the swing set for too long.

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Tools to manage your business in the cloud

Since Bankers Advocate has Virtual Offices with teams members in Orlando, South Florida and the Philippines (Jessie and Rachael are our wonderful Virtual Assistants), we thought you would be interested in the tools we use to be in the “Cloud” and communicate with each other effectively:

  • Google Hosted Email – At $50 per user/year, we switched to Google hosted cloud email via Google Apps. It is very smartphone friendly, spam has been reduced and it syncs continuously with our CRM (see the next product).
  • Capsule CRM – Our Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) is Capsule CRM. We picked Capsule for its low cost ($12/month per user), ability to link to individual Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, Email centric, and it’s seamless integration with Google Hosted email. For instance, every email we receive will show at the bottom whether that individual is already in our CRM and if not a new record can be created with a simple button click.
  • Virtual Assistance from 123Employee – We have used Virtual Assistance from 123Employee for almost a year now and it has allowed our business to become much more efficient by adding or enhancing telemarketing, database management, basic research, seminar follow-up,etc.
  • Websites based on WordPress – We have switched all of our web sites to WordPress. The pluses of a site based on WordPress include the ease of which non programmers (most Business Owners) can upload or change blogs, events, videos and link their site to Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook.
  • Dropbox – Dropbox is a wonderful tool to share files and folders to individuals and team members. You are notified immediately on your desktop when a new file or folder is added. Also, 3gb is free and you get more space as your clients or friends share the tool.

This has been a brief introduction to some of the tools we use to keep in touch and freely communicate with our far-flung team members. Please contact Chris Curtin at 561-882-1331 or chris@bankersadvocate.com for more information.

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New Vistage Small Business Group in Miami

“I am such a big Vistage fan for my clients, I want those in Miami to know about my good friend Les’ new group” Chris

Now Miami area small businesses have access to the advantages of Vistage Membership
Veteran Vistage Chair, Les Deck, will launch the Vistage Small Business Program with a November 29th breakfast at the Marriott, Biscayne Bay 7:30 am until 9:30 am.
• An exclusive group of peer CEOs to serve as your Board of Advisors
• Individual Executive Coaching
• Access to Vistage Village, a worldwide virtual community of over 14,000 members
• Workshops on Leadership, Marketing, Finance and other business topics

Learn why Vistage membership companies are emerging from the recession faster and stronger than their competitors.
If you are CEO or President of a Miami area small business email les@lesdeckconsulting.com to register for the event. You must be registered to attend.

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