Preparing your business for a successful future often goes hand in hand with preparing your business for a successful sale. No matter whom you sell to—and even if you believe you’ll never sell your business—you should focus on catching Deal Killers.
Setting goals is a catalyst for success, especially if you’re planning for the future of your ownership and the success of your business. The strongest goals tend to have five aspects that help you guide the process for achieving them. In other words, when you set goals, you want to set SMART goals:
Successful business owners often want more than just the maximum amount of money they can get. These owners have deeply ingrained values-based goals that guide why and how they do business. But many of those same owners don’t apply an appropriate amount of weight to values-based goals until it’s too late to achieve them.
For nearly 5,500 years, human beings have written things down. From Hammurabi’s Code and the U.S. Constitution to your personal business plans, writing things down helps people follow rules and best practices, and pursue goals and action items. However, many successful business owners don’t have any written plans they can follow to help them achieve […]
Planning for a successful future without your business is a smart strategy. One of the traps that business owners commonly fall into as they begin planning for their successful future without the business is seeing what they need to do and trying to do everything all at once. However, much like your business didn’t spring […]
Tom Poor always vowed to never live up to his namesake. The seventh son of an iron worker, Tom spent years building his successful steel manufacturing company. His success allowed him to provide a lifestyle for his wife and two children that no one in the Poor family had ever had. His company employed 135 people, and his two children were taking on more responsibilities at the company as Tom got older.
Just before Tom’s 70th birthday, he made a startling announcement to his family and company. A large steel conglomerate had offered him $15 million for his company, and he verbally accepted the offer. He assured his employees and children that their jobs were safe based on a handshake agreement he’d made with the buyer. He assumed that $15 million was more than enough to allow him a comfortable lifestyle since his $500,000 salary and benefits package had provided so much for his family to that point.
