Business owners can be a worrisome bunch. Oftentimes owners aren’t even sure what to worry about. One of the top worries for business owners, no matter what stage they’re in, is cash. More specifically, will I run out of cash? So how do you keep track of all your money?
How Much Is My Competitor’s Business Worth?
If you’ve been in business long enough, chances are you’ve received some unsolicited interest in your business. By “interest” we mean someone is expressing an interest in perhaps buying your business. It likely came in the form of a letter that was either physically mailed or emailed or from a phone call. These letters and phone calls often come from intermediaries so the actual person who might be interested in buying your company has their identity hidden. Do you welcome these solicitations with open arms? Do you avoid them like the plague…or COVID? Likely you’re somewhere in between.
How Do I Get Everyone On The Same Page?
One of the biggest challenges and common frustrations of any leader is to get everyone on your team on the same page. Use whatever metaphor you want. Things like “all rowing in the same direction” or “everyone reading from the same hymnal” and hundreds of other cliches. At the end of the day, it comes down to what you focus on as a Leader. Because whatever you focus on is what your team will focus on.
How Do I Put A Program Together To Judge When The Next Generation Is Ready To Take Over The Company?
One of the biggest challenges for a business owner looking to transition their business to the next generation is figuring out who to transition the business to and how to know when that next generation is ready to take over. What does it look like when someone is ready to take over the company? Will you just know it when you see it? Should you have the next generation just follow you around for six months or a couple of years to learn by osmosis?
How Do I Turn Over Rocks?
One of the things we help our clients do is buy companies. We usually start the process off by having our clients “turning over rocks.” Those “rocks” can include everything from talking to business brokers to responding to online listings or ones in the newspaper to sending out unsolicited letters to a target group.
How Do I Keep From Getting Bored In My Business?
It might sound insane or counterintuitive if you run a company, but there is likely a chance you will get bored or distracted at some point. So what should you do to avoid this boredom? What kinds of troubles could this boredom cause in your business?
How Do I Set My Selling Price?
Few things are more strategic when it comes to the success of your company than setting your selling price. Yet we find that most small business owners take an overly simplistic approach to their selling price. It might sound something like, “What’s the competition charge?” Or “What will the market bear?”. While these might be good starting points when you first launch your business, chances are you will be leaving profit on the table, or worse losing money on some of your products or services.
How Do I Launch a New Product or Service?
Believe it or not, we’re almost six months into this COVID-19 pandemic. Needless to say, we’ve all absorbed a lot of changes over that time and more changes and adjustments are coming. Hopefully one of the nice side benefits of this current pandemic is that it’s making you more comfortable with making changes and trying new things.
How Do I Know What My Company Is Worth
At some point during your business life cycle, either you or someone else will ask you this question, “What’s my business worth?” The quick answer is it depends! It depends on a lot of factors. Some of these factors are things you can control while others are out of your control. For instance, you have some control over how you set your selling prices and control your costs, but you can’t control the overall industry growth or how your competitors act.
How do I Make Sure We Are Always Doing Some Marketing?
In the final part of our 3-part series on Marketing Channels we focus on the Passive Marketing Channels. In the prior two shows in the series we focused on the Short Term and Long Term Channels.