The Business Owner Blog

“Want to compare yourself to someone, make it someone great,” my father used to say. Okay, maybe I should compare myself to a winning football coach, such as Sean Payton of the New Orleans Saints. After all, a professional sports team is a business.

A leading cause of business failure in the U.S. is employee theft.1 Organizations lose 5% of their revenue to fraud.2 Small businesses suffer disproportionately2 and the perpetrator is typically a “most trusted” employee. One in twenty-five employees are sociopaths and looking for opportunities to swindle you.

The great news for you is, odds are, your competitors are not hitting on all cylinders. It’s just not the real world. The really well functioning teams are the extreme exception, not the norm.
You remember. You worked for a variety of companies before you became owner. Were they well functioning or did they survive, somehow, despite themselves?

Are you the day-to-day manager of a valuable and profitable company? What happens when the owner of the business you manage wishes to sell? You’d like to buy the business yourself, of course, but you can’t afford it. The owner knows this. But the owner has earned the right to have his or her payday. To maximize his or her payday. Selling it to you just does not seem like the path to a sale that maximizes value.

I’ve had the privilege recently of being invited to help a family through a very difficult time. The controlling owner and manager of a 15-employee business recently passed away. His brother and a few friends and minority shareholders have stepped in to manage the business until it can be sold. Unfortunately, the business is not performing well. The economy, and no doubt the passing of the owner-manager, has taken a serious toll on revenue and profits.

Subscribers to The Business Owner Journal – whether direct or through a sponsor – may join a free audio presentation and discussion on restructuring and recapitalizing your balance sheet. It will be held at 11:30am, Central Standard Time, Wednesday, November 18, 2009. Click Here to Register>>
The presentation will begin with a 20-minute briefing followed [...]

Every business owner deserves his big payday. This is true, but not assured. There’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it. The right way is quietly, orderly and assuredly, for absolute maximum value. Unfortunately, few know how to get this accomplished and it’s far more complicated than people realize. The methodology [...]