Newsletter Posts

One of the hardest aspects of being a business owner is being able to come up with a metric, even an internal one, for what it means for that business to be successful. For some people, that goal is completely monetary – i.e., if they can sell the business for 1 million dollars within 10 years, then that represents success for them. As an example, one of my good friends recently sold his business. While it was always his dream to build a popular retail business, at some point he realized that the excitement, and the dream, mostly involved building a business, and not really running one. So even though the business was turning a monthly profit (which for some people would amount to owning a lifelong lifestyle business) he decided that it met his own definition of a successful business, at which point he sold it and cashed in […]

I recently was looking at a business plan for a new venture that came across my desk. The two individuals involved are trying to raise money for a bar in South America that they will manage. It’s one of those businesses that most people dream about – a foreign country with lots of sunshine, lots of friendly travellers, and evenings spent sipping beer on a patio. Sign me up! As part of their business plan, they needed to come up with a value for what this new business would likely be worth once it was off the ground. The reason you need to have a value is that when you are trying to solicit investments from people, they need to understand how much of the company they will own. So if a business is worth $500,000, and an investor puts in $100,000, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for them to own […]