Imagine you’re a farmer and you’ve been tending to your crops all year. It’s harvest season and finally time to collect the spoils of your labor. You start harvesting your crops only to find out that pesky rodents have been quietly eating away at your fields....
Are your customers an asset? They could be a core part of your value to a potential acquirer. But that value is directly related to the strength of your relationship with those customers. Are your customers raving fans? Do they provide you with recurring revenue? Do...
If your goal is to grow your business fast, you need a positive cash flow cycle or the ability to raise money at a feverish pace. Anything less and you will quickly grow yourself out of business. A positive cash flow cycle simply means you get...
It may be surprising but there are times when a buyer may value your management team and employees more than your products or revenue. Your key leaders, your research and development team, a strong sales force, or subject matter experts may be the missing piece...
If you’re trying to figure out what your business might be worth, it’s helpful to consider what acquirers are paying for companies like yours these days. A little Internet research will probably reveal that a business like yours trades for a multiple of your pre-tax profit,...
In the previous article in this series we discussed the importance of scalability and defensibility in building value in a company. A key means to achieving both is establishing unique intellectual property as an asset of the company. What is the ‘secret sauce’ that your company...
It’s not surprising that most entrepreneurs of start-up companies focus on generating revenue from any viable source. Product revenue, services revenue, or both; whatever is easier to get and helps pay the bills. Once the basics are covered and a company grows beyond startup mode, business...
Overview Growing a middle market technology business is a challenging endeavor. Day-to-day choices affect immediate operations and the bottom line, as well as the longer-term value of the company. With hectic schedules and immediate pressures like customer needs, growth and profitability, business executives sometimes lose sight...
Stephanie Breedlove started Breedlove & Associates in 1992 as a way to pay her nanny. The big payroll processors weren’t interested in dealing with one person’s wages and doing it themselves was complicated and time-consuming, too much for the then overwhelmed Breedloves. Breedlove saw a business...
We get to meet a lot of company founders who are contemplating an exit. Some of our clients get lucky early in life, but in the vast majority of examples where a founder is getting a seven- or eight-figure offer, it is not their first...