Posts Categorized: Building Business Value

How To Avoid The Idiot Tax

Kenan Hopkins spent 7 years paying what he calls “the idiot tax”, until he learned the more efficient way to run a business. Kenan Hopkins founded his delivery food service company, Blue Ridge To Go, with no real management skills, no idea how to run a business, a lump of personal credit card debt, and… Read more »

Embracing Technology to Boost Your Business

Forbes author Keith Gregg’s, February 8, 2019 article, “Using Tech to Enhance and Sell a Business,” has a range of interesting ideas that business owners should explore and embrace.  Gregg looks at three big ways that business owners can use technology to help them get the most out of the sale of the business.  He… Read more »

How to Lose $200 Million

You’ll never know the ideal time to sell your company — but in many cases, it’s when someone’s willing to buy it. Rand Fishkin, the bestselling author of Lost & Founder, learned this lesson the hard way when his company Moz received a $25 million dollar offer from HubSpot despite only expecting to do around… Read more »

5 Ways To Package Your Service

If you’re a service provider, it can be difficult to separate the service from the provider. Your customers might demand you, which means you can’t scale your business beyond the number of hours you’re willing to work. In the absence of a point of differentiation, offering generic services leads consumers to evaluate the people doing the work. Referring… Read more »

3 Strategic Reasons Big Companies Buy Small Ones

Ottawa-based phone company Versature was acquired by net2phone in the fall of last year. In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, you’ll hear Versature co-founder Jonathan Moody describe: • The surprising downside of offering too many things • The impact your geographic location can have on the value of your company • How Moody… Read more »

What Kind of Buyers are You Most Likely to Meet?

Selling a business can be an exciting and rather lucrative time. But going through the sales process means embracing the notion that you’ll have to be very prepared for whatever might be thrown your way. A key aspect of preparing to sell your business is to know what types of buyers you’re likely to encounter…. Read more »

Two Exiting Tips From One Of The Top 40 Under 40

Wind Mobile founder Anthony Lacavera has started 12 businesses, six of which he has exited. His exits have ranged in value from the $6 million he got for one of his recent start-ups to $1.3 billion when he sold Wind Mobile. He did it by following two key tips. Understand what kind of company you… Read more »

How to Get One Million More from PwC

Can a small, 30 employee team make a successful transition to the corporate environment of one of the Big Four auditors (and stay on-board)? Find out  what happens post-sale on today’s candid episode. Ann Bennett was founder of Applied Information Services (AIS) – a first-of-its-kind, PC-based software company that processed K-1s (internal tax forms given to… Read more »

How To Avoid Disappointment When It’s Time To Cash Out

How do you avoid not being disappointed with the money you make from the sale of your company? Perhaps you’ve heard that companies like yours trade using an industry rule of thumb or that companies of your size sell within a specific range, and you want to get at least what your peers have received…. Read more »