Exit Planning Newsletter for Business OwnersExit_Planning_Newsletter_for_Business_Owners.html

Over the past few months we have shared with you a number of ideas about how you and your company can approach both the challenges and the opportunities that this economy has thrown at all of us. We’ve discussed specific issues such as fraud, and more general issues such as preserving value, focusing on cash flow, increasing revenue and keeping all actions consistent with your ultimate goal: leaving your company when you want, to the successor you choose, for the amount of cash you want or need.

That’s a lot to digest for anyone, let alone for business owners who are focused on steering their companies — successfully — through this economic turbulence. For that reason, we’ve developed a diagnostic tool to help you pinpoint the areas in your company where your actions can have the greatest positive effect.

This tool is a workbook that is organized into four sections:

  1. BulletMaximizing Current Cash Flow and Projecting Future Cash Flow

  2. Announcing a Tool For Business Owners: Meet Today's Challenges and Exploit Today's OpportunitiesPreserving and Protecting Value

  3. Time: Too Much or Too Little?
Active business owners seldom slow down. We all know that the only things likely to reduce your pace are death or terminal burn-out. This is not to imply that you are not well intentioned; quite the contrary. You are so well intentioned that you’ve taken on more tasks than you can possibly complete.Creating and Maximizing Business Value

  4. Indecision: The WRONG Decision
“I haven’t decided what I ultimately want to do with my business, or when I want to exit, or how much money I’ll need, or whom to sell to, so how can I plan my exit? Besides, I don’t want to exit right now.” If you’ve said this, or thought it, you are not alone. Many business owners are either overwhelmed with the thought of exiting or are so busy fighting daily business fires that they think they cannot plan their exits.Reassessing Strategic Objectives


In each section, we ask a series of questions that help you think about various ways you might address current challenges and take advantage of opportunities. Once you answer all the questions, we will generate a chart that will illustrate for you where you feel you’ve been deficient (and successful) in meeting today’s economic challenges. From there, we can generate a report that includes a list of suggestions to help your company survive and grow during uncertain times.

Let’s look at one section: Maximizing Current Cash Flow and Projecting Future Cash Flow. We’ve divided that section into several sectors that deal with assessing:

  1. Meet Today's Challenges and Exploit Today's Opportunities 
Over the past few months we have shared with you a number of ideas about how you and your company can approach both the challenges and the opportunities that this economy has thrown at all of us. We’ve discussed specific issues such as fraud, and more general issues such as preserving value, focusing on cash flow, increasing revenue and keeping all actions consistent with your ultimate goal: leaving your company when you want, to the successor you choose, for the amount of cash you want or need.Company cash flow and your ability to measure and manage it;

  2. Fraud - Do you know it when you see it? 
The subject of employee dishonesty is a delicate one. Owners generally want to trust their employees, and given all the other battles owners fight on a daily basis, they are often not as vigilant as they can or should be. Vigilance requires an investment of time and money in return for an uncertain payoff. So let’s look at a typical fraud scenario. The company’s current business model and suggesting ways to modify it as necessary;

  3. Preserve and Protect Your Business On All Fronts 
We kicked off our discussion with the final item — creating value — because today, most owners are so focused on cutting expenses and minimizing risk and taxes that they’ve ignored their ultimate goal: creating a company with enough value to leave it for an amount of money that will support them — in style — for the rest of their lives. Your efforts to produce future cash flow; and

  4. Your company’s long-term growth strategy.


Depending upon what we learn from your answers to our questions, our suggestions may include everything from sitting down with your CPA or CFO for a quick “Cash Flow 101” tutorial, to outsourcing non-essential or non-core business functions. For some, we might recommend a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) Analysis, while we may work with other owners to create future cash flow projections for the best, worst and likeliest case scenarios. The suggestions we make will be based on your answers, and will be tailored for your unique business situation.

Completing this new Workbook takes less than one hour. We are confident that the time you spend on this Workbook will be the most productive hour you’ve spent working on (not in) your business this year. We encourage you to take advantage of this diagnostic tool that was created for mid-size business owners and is available exclusively to us as members of Business Enterprise Institute.

We are anxious to help you sort through the challenges and opportunities you face and to help you create a strategy for your company’s unique situation. As Exit Planning specialists, we will create a strategy that is both consistent with your ultimate exit planning goals and will place you among (according to a May 30, 2009 report in The Economist) the businesses that will succeed because they “are miserly with costs, wary of debt, cautious with cash flow and obsessively attentive to what customers want. ”

We will contact you directly soon to schedule a time to complete the Workbook. If you’d like to get started today, just give us a call.

Exit Planning Newsletter for Business Owners
Time is Essential in the Transfer to Insiders
In this series of articles about transfer to insiders, we identified a number of elements that are part of the well-designed transfer to insiders. The first element we identified was the qualifier: Time.Time_-_Too_Much_or_Too_Little.html
Elements of a Plan to Sell to Insiders
In the previous issue of this newsletter, we compared the attributes of sales to third parties to those of transfers to insiders. We looked at the often-overlooked risk involved in third party sales and the equally overlooked benefit of owner control and payoff in insider transfers. Indecision_-_The_WRONG_Decision.html
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