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What’s Your Business’s Hidden Assets?
What assets make your business more valuable to future owners or investors?
Most entrepreneurs have unique businesses. So how do you know what makes your business more valuable to future owners or investors? What are your organization’s key assets? I recently started working with a client who has a strong consulting business and is trying to decide what his business is worth. He got a call out of the blue from a potential buyer who is interested in the business. Now the challenging part begins to determine what the business is worth today and why is it worth that.
There are four main assets buyers assess in deciding a consulting business’s worth. I break them down so we all can decide what the business might be worth if he chooses to sell. It’s funny that now he got the call of the lifetime, he has to decide what his lifetime investment is worth. How would you respond if you got this call? His first response was to give me a call. Wise choice, I would say, but hey, I’m biased. More importantly, I’ve been through this before with similar consulting practices. Continue reading
Can You Develop a High Performing Leadership Team?
How do you celebrate your team’s victories?
What’s the key to building a growing, profitable business? How do you build a leadership team that can help you lead your markets? I’ve spent the last twenty five years working with and leading many of the world’s best run high growth businesses. I’ve spent my career recruiting and developing many of the world’s best leadership teams. I’ve been involved in merger and acquisition activities for several high growth mid-market organizations who have achieved sales exceeding $900 million in sales less than 10 years after their founding in manufacturing, software, and information technology markets.
What have I learned that can help you build a high performing leadership team? I found four factors that all successful high growth businesses have in common. If you focus on these key elements when your recruit and develop your team, you can build your own high performing leadership team. Continue reading
What Did Mom Teach You about Success in Life and Selling?
What life lessons did your mother teach you?
Why do we fail to sell potential clients? Why do so many great deals fall apart before the end? What’s the elephant in the room that’s keeping your life from taking off? In a word, it’s trust. I think it’s easy to say, but not so easy to understand. Since its Mother’s Day this week, I thought I might share what my mother taught me growing up about building better relationships with people. I think it directly applies to selling and all other ways of being persuasive. As you already know, mothers can be extremely persuasive. Continue reading
Can Iron Man Help Make Your Clients a Superhero?
How Do You Make Your Client a Hero with Your Marketing Efforts?
Iron Man 3 debuts this Friday at the Movies. What marketing lessons can we learn and apply from this marketing juggernaut? What can we learn about differentiating our business in a crowded market from Tony Stark? How might we apply Iron Man’s marketing magic to our business development efforts? I thought it might be fun to share several lessons that can help you get the business results you want from your marketing efforts. After all, if it’s not fun and quirky, it’s just another superhero movie. Continue reading
Three Plans That Every Growing Business Owner Needs
How do you work on what your business needs for growth?
To create a growing business that thrives beyond its early stages, most businesses need to generate three key plans. What are those three plans and how do they help you build a high growth business?
When you look at the most successful businesses, you discover that each of these plans plays a unique role during different stages of the business’s growth. Over the next several months, we share why you should consider having these plans completed and what it can do to add value to your business. I work with you to create solid plans that not only produce better results today, but allow you to create long term growth for your business.
We are launching a new blog called High Growth Business Report at http://www.highgrowthbusiness.com, designed to take on the unique challenges your high growth business faces with sales between $5 million and $100 million per year. I’m very excited about launch this new blog on Thursday. I hope it helps you build the business and life of your dreams. Continue reading
How Do You Build a Great Team?
How do you inspire your team?
Have you ever walked into a business and it seems all the employees are just putting in their time? They look at potential customers as a distraction to the work they have to do that day? If the business has multiple locations, you wonder why some of their locations are down in the dumps and others are creating incredible customer experiences. I thought it might be helpful to share several key ideas to help you build a motivated workforce. Because your business can only grow if everyone is committed to growing it. One of the biggest challenges a high growth business faces is creating a culture of high performance.
Let’s talk about five things I’ve learned that help create a high performance culture. If you can move your people through these challenges, you’re on your way to transforming the way your business grows, increasing both value and visibility so you can be sell it. Continue reading
Is Everyone in Your Business Customer Driven?
Are your team members customer focused?
I’m sure you get calls every day from people you don’t know about things you don’t need. As you begin developing your own market development plans, have you included everyone on your team that will be impacted by your decisions? Your business development results are only as good as the team supporting your efforts. So how do you involve your whole team?
In the past, I ran marketing for a large specialty retailer. I used to get in trouble with my boss all the time because I made sure the cashiers and customer service people were trained on the weekly ads and special events. My boss would say he had sales people to sell and the cashiers and customer service people had other jobs to do. I knew, without a doubt, several customers a day would come in and be introduced to my business by team members who normally didn’t interact with customers but, for whatever reason, they had to deal with customer questions. Continue reading
How Sales Systems Can Increase Mobile’s Top Line Results
How do you increase your sales results through mobile?
What’s the most important part of your mobile solution? I got several notes from entrepreneurs telling me that they think that developing systems for their business is crazy. They don’t need to systemize their business to succeed. They told me systems thinking is something out of an earlier century. People need to be free if you want to get great results from their efforts. These are very good questions and comments. I’m asked these questions a lot when I work with clients on increasing the sales value of their businesses.
My 30 years of buying and selling businesses has taught me that businesses that have good systems are worth way more than those with charismatic leaders, great sales professionals, or superior operations teams. Here’s why, if I’m buying a business, I want to know that I’ll get the same, if not better, results than you are getting now. If I have to count on you for my results, it’s not a great investment for my organization. Continue reading
How to Increase the Value of Your Business with Better Partnerships
Increase Your Businesses Value through Stronger Partnerships
How do you find the best organizations to partner with in your market? Do you know which other companies are working with your best clients? Where do they work in your client’s organization? Can you get your client to introduce you to the other companies? As your business grows, you might want to consider investing in building a better partnership strategy that can help both partners get better business results. Over the years, I’ve seen many organizations bought and sold because they met through a mutual client.
I’ve put together a partnership framework I use when I’m trying to identify good partnering opportunities for my clients. I thought it might be helpful to share it here and see how you could improve your partnership opportunities. As one of the critical elements when looking to sell your business, many buyers are looking to see who your partners are and how well that partnership is adding to sales and profits. I’ve seen several larger organizations buy smaller organizations based on several key partnerships in emerging technology markets. This acquisition allows them to jumpstart new practices with a blueprint they can rollout across their organization. Let’s look at how I find partnership opportunities. Continue reading
Can Systems Help Deploy Your Mobile Strategy?
How do you gear up for mobile?
How do you create a mobile strategy that helps you leverage the unique technology it provides? The biggest challenge of mobile is how it changes the way you do business. For mobile to provide the greatest benefit it must complement your overall business strategy. Over the years I’ve worked on many projects that leverage new technology to increase business results. Mobile can help you reach your goals to grow your business, but it has already shown that if its not implemented right it can cost you not only sales, but customers, as well.
When I work with businesses to implement a new technology, I look at three key systems to make sure that it provides the edge we expect from early on in the rollout process. I’ve used these three systems in over 100 technology rollouts. I’ve seen it done right, and I’ve seen them fail. Since mobile is such a visible platform for your business, it is critical to get it right and then keep improving it. Using systems to deploy technology comes from many different sources, but I first started using it over 20 years ago after learning the concept from Michael Gerber, who had just shared The E-Myth with the world. Continue reading
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