Posts Categorized: Building Business Value

How Do Business Performance and Health Affect Your Planning?

How Do Business Performance and Health Affect Your Planning? Many successful business owners don’t feel any urgency to plan for the futures of their businesses. When owners are comfortable where they’re at, they may struggle to plan with a longer view of their business futures, perhaps asking, “Why change what works?” One way to answer… Read more »

Should You Sell Your Family Business?

  When the complicating variable of family is added to the equation of selling a business, the situation can get rather messy.  Family usually complicates everything and businesses are, of course, no exception.  Ken McCracken’s recent article “Family business: to sell or not to sell?” 6 questions to help you make the right decision,” seeks… Read more »

Why You Should Focus on Proper Exit Planning

  If you are like many business owners, you are primarily focusing on building your business.  Yet, as we’ve covered here many times before, you should start thinking about what you’ll need to do to sell your business before you even officially launch.  Many businesses can take years to sell or even fail to sell… Read more »

The Top Ways to Create an Attention-Grabbing Sales Ad to Sell Your Business

A major part of selling your business is getting the word out.  After all, the more people that know your business is for sale, the better off you’ll be.  In Bob House’s recent article, “How to Create an Effective Business for Sale Ad and Ensure It Gets the Best Result,” House gives readers an assortment… Read more »

What Do You Need to Do to Get Your Business Ready to Sell?

  In his recent article in Smart Business entitled, “How to get your business, and yourself, ready for sale,” author Adam Burroughs explores the key points of getting your business ready to sell.  Burroughs points to the truism that, at some point, almost every business owner must sell his or her business.  For this reason,… Read more »

How To Find A $100 Million Idea

Dr. David Bach is a Harvard-trained scientist, physician, and serial entrepreneur. Bach has founded and built three healthcare companies, each of which grew to over $100 million in value. His most recent exit was from Leprechaun LLC which became the fastest-growing company in America before it was acquired delivering a 90X return for his shareholders…. Read more »

Must You Fire Your Managers to Grow the Business?

Must You Fire Your Managers to Grow the Business? Building business value is a common goal among business owners. Many successful small business owners find that after years of growth, the company can begin to plateau. It can be frustrating if you and your longtime managers realize that all of the things that grew the… Read more »

The True Value Of Sticky Customers

  Can you exit your business if you’re in a declining industry? The answers – according to CJ Whelan, who co-founded Adigo, a teleconferencing business, is yes — on one condition: you must have sticky customers. In the absence of an innovative product, acquirers may still buy your business if you can prove you have… Read more »

WP Curve Get Acquired By Go Daddy

In 2013, Alex McClafferty co-founded WP Curve, a company that provided IT support for people with a WordPress site. McClafferty and his partner stitched together a network of contract support professionals in developing countries and quickly grew the company. They hired a few managers, and by the beginning of 2016, McClafferty was already looking for… Read more »

The Backstory Behind E&J Gallo’s Acquisition of Barefoot Cellars

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey built Barefoot Cellars to sales of more than 600,000 cases of wine per year when they got the attention of E&J Gallo, America’s largest winemaker. Gallo was impressed with how quickly a $7 bottle of Barefoot moved off retailers’ shelves and were intrigued by Barefoot’s use of grassroots sponsorship to… Read more »