A HOLISITIC APPROACH TO your BUSINESS Future

Do you have an exit plan for your business? If not you are the among the 83% of small and medium-sized business owners in the same boat. Current surveys show that 50% of business owners plan to exit their business in the next 5 years and 75% in the next 7 years. Also from the survey, 80% of owners have 90% of their wealth in their business.

There are five ways to exit your business with variations. First is the cash cow or strip the value from the company, the second is liquidation not usually the best choice, third acquisition by another company often the most profitable, fourth sale to a friendly buyer, family or staff, and finally the sale on the open market.

It generally takes three to 10 years to properly prepare a business for your exit strategy. By starting the planning early your reap many benefits.

Higher value for the sale of business
Reduce taxes resulting from the sale
Reduce the amount of vendor financing
Reduce the amount of time and energy you continue to invest in company
Speed up the payout of the business
Increased your family happiness
Secure the ongoing legacy of your company

I have a 20 question survey that will highlight the issues you may face and put you on a scale to show where you are in the process. We can then discuss your roadmap to business exit and if and how we may work together.

Our role as a business advisor is to understand your business, provide clear choices and a variety of alternative courses of action for you to act on. We have no vested interest in any of the choices. How you proceed is entirely your choice. Our goal is to provide you with unique choices to support you in making your best executive decisions.

We all (or should anyways) go for annual checkups with our doctor. Why? Not because we have something wrong but to check that we don't have some undiscovered illness or problem. From this checkup, we get the all clear (best response) or we get advice on how to protect our health from developing challenges.
We will do the same for your business. We probe beyond the obvious and provide a comprehensive report. We call this report a holistic review of your business. It includes financial review, sales, marketing, social and environmental factors, technology, human resources, risk management as part of a 100 checkpoint framework.

As a father of a 16-year-old boy, the importance of regular report cards can not be overstated. Once we move on from the school system, the report card is left behind. We customise a report card for your business. It has multiple broad-based measures beyond your financial performance. It provides a measure of how your business is adapting to changing conditions. It will allow you to reward and develop successes and focus on improving parts of the business that are under performing. Regular report cards will allow you to accurately measure your progress.

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A number of the businesses that I have worked for and with have been family owned. This broad experience with family business has taught me that running a family business presents many unique challenges. The key one is being able to adapt to changes as the business and family mature. A key service we offer is to listen to ownership and provide frank unbias comments on important ideas. We then provide alternative options. The result is clearly defined choices for the ownership to act on. We provide continued support to turn these choices into actions. We will fill an important role as trusted advisor to bounce ideas off.

I have always had an interest in new technology and processes and their application to problems. With small and medium businesses the application of new technology often lags far behinds its needs. Today there is no shortage of new apps, data systems and automated systems that are a being offered. While these promise and will deliver superior results, they can have an incredibly disruptive effect on you and your business. The suppliers of these new technologies are focused on maximizing their features and often do not understand the complexity of your business. In the many projects, I have implemented I have discovered that when all the secondary effects are dealt with, then the project is truly successful. This is where the holistic approach is very important.

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