Buying a Business | Buying a Small Business
When preparing to sell a small business the value can be raised if the business is generating income on an “automated basis,” however you will find that many small businesses income is totally dependant on the personality of the small business owner, so this is something to take into account when making a purchase. Do your due diligence at this article suggests.
Q: I have identified a business that I’m interested in buying. It fits my size, type and location requirements, and I have assembled my acquisition team. How do I determine if this is a good purchase?
A: You perform proper due diligence. This is when you gather information about the business and evaluate the purchase transaction.
About the Podcast Interview With Stuart Elliot of The New York Times
Stuart Elliott of The New York Times and I met at the ANA CASIE Award event in Jacksonville in 1996 for my team’s work on IBM’s Kasparov vs. Deep Blue and we reconvened for a short chat in this podcast call. Stuart talks about the lines blurring between marketers becoming media companies and ad agencies becoming media companies across everything and every category in a totally changed landscape. Stuart comments on Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer’s comments on the fact that he said in the Seattle Times, “Microsoft is going to be an advertising company.”
“Consumers are now publishing on MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. The topic of the day is the ability of marketers to find consumers that they want which is enhanced by new media and in some cases harmed by new media,” states Stuart Elliot columnist of The New York Times.
With the internet you can more precisely target ads that are more relevant. Consumers can fast forward their way through the ads on TV. Consumer unhappiness is only about ads that are not targeted towards them.
So many different companies doing so many different things and the winners and losers have yet to be determined. Once big marketers have more experience it will be interesting where they spend their dollars. In mobile advertising it is like the wild west, Stuart also comments about mobile advertising being more widely adopted overseas than here in the USA. Stuart commented on my example of Budweiser buying a drink on their tab while being in a pub in New York City, “advertising can a welcome thing instead of an annoyance.”
I share with Stuart my familiarity with Green Team USA and Profitable Green Solutions and the potential of the “green opportunity” is just getting started and we need to look at the green space as an opportunity not as an annoyance. I share with Stuart the Green Space article in B to B Online we comment on and cover Dan Henson Vice President and CMO of General Electric, Co. who was awarded their Marketer of the Year, “GE used to have a terrible reputation in the environment and have turned it around with Ecomagination and backing it up with more environmentally sound deeds.”
We talk about the big holding companies, WPP, Omnicom and Interpublic will continue the trend buying up the smaller agencies and once people get tired of big company environments there is a big opportunity for small businesses and consultants in the advertising space, it runs in cycles.
We talk about measurable and accountable dollars in the agency space. For years direct marketers were considered the red headed step child of advertising. The expense of advertising is becoming more visible.
Supermarkets have been able to track purchases. Stuart talks about the Coke and Pepsi coupons inside the supermarkets. I talk about Nielson doing research about on body language in their purchasing on the store shelves and Stuart talks about how they are starting to implant chips in peoples heads when they see the ads.
We also cover referral marketing and trust factors are one of the better ways to market and Stuart shared that word of mouth marketing (WOMA), buzz marketing, viral marketing trying to reach consumers outside the traditional media is a trend, going after their personal relationships.
I shared with Stuart my experience at the Head of the Charles Crew Races on October 20th 2007 and how Gillette had a booth there and were educating the consumers with a quiz on their new Gillette Fusion Razor with the battery. Stuart said that is a perfect example of how people are trying different ways to advertise.
This is a New York paced interview, it moves quickly and we cover a lot of ground in a short period of time.
About Stuart Elliot
Stuart Elliot has been covering advertising and media since 1982 and has been with the New York Times as the advertising columnist since 1991. He was an advertising reporter with the USA Today, Advertising Age and consumer marketing automotive subjects in Detroit before coming to the Times.
How easy it is to do business with the federal government
Dick White CEO of Fedmarket http://fedmarket.com recently completed a lengthy podcast interview http://www.mysuccessgateway.com/guru/podcasts.php?id=69# with Jim Peake, Founder and CEO of small business information provider My Success Gateway, LLC http://mysuccessgateway.com to talk about “how easy it is to do business with the federal government.” Yes it can be easy, this is not a typo.
My Success Gateway, LLC has been focusing on several other businesses who are also providing services by helping small businesses navigate the federal marketplace. Some of those interviews are with: Lloyd Chapman of the American Small Business League who is a vocal advocate for small businesses, Paul Murphy of Eagle Eye Publishing who publishes federal procurement and grant business intelligence via databases and Paul Miller of Miller/Wenhold Capitol Strategies, LLC who is a small business lobbyist firm.
“Newcomers to the federal require “approved price lists” or, as you put it in our interview Jim, a ‘ticket to the dance.’ For a small business the ticket is a General Service Administration (GSA) schedule contract. GSA schedule contracts provide companies with approved federal price lists that federal buyers can use to purchase products and services quickly with minimal red tape,” said Dick White of Fedmarket.
The US Federal Government is the world’s largest customer. My Success Gateway, LLC delivers an in depth interview with Dick White of Fedmarket where you will learn what is required and how easy it is to become a federal government contractor. The interview can be found at http://www.mysuccessgateway.com/guru/podcasts.php?id=69#
My Success Gateway, LLC is a small business and entrepreneurial coaching and training center. My Success Gateway, LLC provides interviews in a mentoring podcast format.
Fedmarket.com offers a unique GSA service called an eLab. For $ 3,900 a small businesses attend a 3 Day computer workshop (eLab) and go home with a GSA schedule application ready to submit to GSA. In short, we are not teaching you how to apply for an approved price list; we are helping you complete the red tape to obtain the price list.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page with Jim Fallows at Zeitgeist ‘07
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e3AR2k0foM
Larry and Sergey provide some insights into their entrepreneurial juggernaut, Google. The talk about space, health care the Google Index, solar power, green technology, green generation, Toyota Prius, Compact fluorescent bulbs, Internet regulation, privacy issues, investment in people in Africa etc.
President Clinton speaks about Kiva at Google’s Zeitgesit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43sUEFcD4Ro
Kiva is one of the amazing organizations of our time. They are making a global difference. Find time to get to know them.
Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.
Let me just give you one example, one of the most interesting ones is a little website called Kiva.org which allows individuals of very modest means to become directly involved in extending microcredit to people in Africa, Central Asia, Latin America, all kinds of developing countries by actually selecting projects, contributing to them, knowing that a local non-governmental organization is managing this, getting reports on it, and then becoming ongoing with their involvement.
Kiva analyses all kinds of business people and give credit all over the world. And after I talked about them and they were featured on Oprah Winfrey’s show when my book came out, for the first time in their brief history they had no more customers and more credit than they knew what to to do with. So I think we’ve only scratched the surface of having people see that people in other countries with different skin colors and different perspectives and different fates actually have a lot in common with them.
Interview with Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic
This is an enlightening interview.
When Richard Branson was at school, his headmaster predicted he would wind up either a millionaire or in jail. Since then, he’s done both. Here he talks to TED’s Chris Anderson about the ups and the downs of his career, from his multibillionaire success to his multiple near-death experiences, from Virgin’s line of spacecraft to the failure of the Virgin condom. He also reveals some of his (very surprising) motivations.
He’s ballooned across the Atlantic, floated down the Thames with the Sex Pistols, and been knighted by the Queen. His megabrand, Virgin, is home to more than 250 companies, from gyms, gambling houses and bridal boutiques to fleets of planes, trains and limousines. The man even owns his own island.
And now Richard Branson is moving onward and upward into space (tourism): Virgin Galactic’s Philippe Starck-designed, Burt Rutan-engineered spacecraft are slated to start carrying passengers into the thermosphere in 2009, at $200,000 a ticket.
Branson also has a philanthropic streak. He’s pledged the next 10 years of profits from his transportation empire (an amount expected to reach $3 billion) to the development of renewable alternatives to carbon fuels. And then there’s his Virgin Earth Challenge, which offers a $25 million prize to the first person to come up with an economically viable solution to the greenhouse gas problem.
“There is luck, and then there is Richard Branson luck.”
The New Yorker, May 14, 2007
When is the right time to get a mentor?
In this article about Joss Stone the brilliant singer from the UK they talk about her unwillingness to “listen” to her managers. From what it sounds like to me there might be some issues with “trust.” Establishing trust and letting go of the control of the “issue” is where there appears to be a breakdown.
Joss is young and this is just a small blip on the journey of life, probably more frustrating to the people who want to help her than she herself. I can remember not listening at her age, heck sometimes I still don’t listen, but I am working on it.
Learning how to sell real estate by making mistakes
I saw this post in RealtyTimes.com and as sometimes we try to become perfect the real learning is in making mistakes, and this is one thing I can personally say I am a professional at. But Claudia has some insights for the Real Estate Sales executive.
Taguchi Optimization of Spaghetti?
In listening to this podcast/videocast from Malcolm Gladwell author of Blink and The Tipping Point he makes reference to testing different types of spaghetti sauces. While the food manufacturers have been trying to create 1 sauce for the masses it was found that different people like different types of sauces, some like it lumpy, some like it spicy some like it any other which way.
The lesson here is how we sell and position our own products, are we differentiating?
Embracing failures is becoming important for companies’ long-term success
Is your company embracing the F-word? No, not that F-word, but one that business traditionalists perceive to be every bit as dirty: failure.
Although it sounds counterintuitive, a number of companies-some of them high-profile, Fortune 500 concerns-are now looking at failure as a necessary element of success in today’s competitive business environment. A July 2006 cover story in BusinessWeek even detailed how companies like Coca-Cola, Corning, and Intuit are embracing and leveraging what it termed “intelligent failures” and creating corporate cultures that encourage innovation and accept risk-taking.
The concept isn’t entirely new, of course. Examples of companies such as 3M (which created its blockbuster Post-it Note products from “failed” glue that had been sidelined years earlier) and MCI CEO Bill McGowan (who posted a sign in the lobby that read, “Make Some Damn Mistakes”) are the stuff of legend in the business world.