Selling Your Business: What You’ll Give to Your California Business Broker
When you start your process with an M&A Advisor (California Business Broker) to sell your business, he or she will ask you a number of questions about your business and your goals. There are two key reasons we ask so many questions:
- Your California Business Broker needs everything that is vital to the buyer. This makes the process faster and makes everything work more smoothly and ensures that the buyer won’t have any objections.
- Your broker will also need the data for the marketing of your business.
To be ready is to be successful. The goal is to get everything ready from the get-go before the buyer, bankers and investors ask for the information. This is how we’ll make sure that the deal runs smoothly, and it’s how we’ll make sure that you come away with the best deal, and that we close the deal.
What You’ll Provide About Your Company
What you see next is a partial outline of the data you’ll provide about your business when we get things rolling.
Company Organization and History
- The full history and timeline of your company
- How your business is structured, and the ownership
- Your latest organization chart
- A copy of your most important staff, any issues you might have about your employees, and what these people do on a day-to-day basis
Information About Your Products and Services
- Make a copy of your primary products and services
- Write a total description of these services and products
- Now, write the history of these same services and products
- And prepare a Competitive analysis
- Get all your licences, patents, etc. arranged
- Make sure that you’ve got your product delivery mechanisms well-defined
- Put all your warranties in the open
- And, make a complete assessment of your technology
An Assessment of Your Industry
- Write a general of your industry
- Discuss the different trends that are happening in your industry
- Describe what you see for the future of your industry
- Describe the demographics of your industry
- Discuss the general concerns of your industry
Understanding a bit about Your Customers
- Who are your primary customers?
- How do they pay you?
- Have you recently lost any key customers?
- What new key customers have you added recently?
- What is the buying cycle of your primary customers
Getting to the bottom of your Sales and Marketing
- Let us see your sales and marketing plans
- Provide a detailed description of your marketing and sales tactics
- Discuss your sales force with us
- What type of promotion and advertising do you do?
- Describe your distribution channels in full.
What About Your Competition?
- Who are your most important competitors?
- Will your primary accounts go to the competitors?
- How do you think your competition will react?
And, There’s More…
You’ll also provide details about:
- Your Vendors and Suppliers
- Your facility and buildings
- Everything about your equipment
- Significant information/data about you
- And, finally, you’ll provide detailed data about your business, financial records, and inventory
Summary
As you can see, our data investigation goes both deep and broad. When selling a business, we try to make the process simple, and that requires as much information about your company up front as possible. This guarantees that the buyer will have all the information he or she needs to breeze through the due diligence process and will come to closure more quickly. As business brokers and M&A Advisors, we want to make sure that the selling process goes as smoothly as possible.
 It’s not always easy transitioning to a home office. So we offer these Tips for Working at Home to help you get started.
Boost Focus and Productivity by Reducing Communication Distractions
During the course of a given day, think about how many different ways you might be distracted from the tasks you have in front of you – a notification pops up in the corner of your screen letting you know you have a new email, your phone vibrates to let you know you received a new message on Twitter, the phone rings… and the list goes on and on. Let’s face facts – we live in distraction oriented culture, where we’re encouraged to be in near-constant contact with the outside world.
While staying in touch is great in theory, being constantly available to the outside world can be an ongoing source of distractions and interruptions. In my work with clients, many of them say that dealing with these distractions has become a major part of daily life, and is taking a toll on their productivity. Here are some strategies for stemming the tide of interruptions and getting back on track towards being more efficient:
Prioritize your key tasks. Before you start your work each day, take a few moments to write down what your priority tasks are going to be that day. Set aside time on your calendar to work on those tasks, and make those times “communication free zones” – meaning that you won’t check email, answer calls, or instant-message during those times, unless doing so relates specifically to the project you’re working on. Setting aside this space to work on your projects will help you stay focused and get closer to your goal of finishing a given task.
Beware of “helpful” notifications. Pretty much every system we use to communicate, whether it’s instant message, email, social media, voice mail, text messaging, etc., has a way to notify us when we’ve received a new message or communication request. Ask yourself, are these notifications serving you, or are they an interruption? For most of us, the latter is the case. Instead of allowing these tech tools distract you, set specific times during the day when you will check for new messages, email, etc., and turn off the notifications. You could check your various inboxes twice a day, every few hours, or every hour, depending on the volume of communication you receive. Very, very few messages are so urgent that they can’t wait an hour or two for you to return the communication.
Don’t get sucked into the social media vortex. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace… these are all great tools, and can be a lot of fun. They can also generate a voluminous amount of messages that require your attention and time. If you’re using these tools for purely personal use, limit your use of them to outside business hours, and set some parameters about how much time you’d like to spend on them. If social media is a part of your business, make sure to set aside time on your calendar during your work day to process your new messages and friend requests. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that managing these sites is something that can be done in the ever-elusive “spare time” – keeping current with your profiles has to become part of your scheduled tasks.
These are some of my favorite ways to reduce communication-related distractions – what are some of yours?
Joshua Zerkel, CPO® is a the founder of Custom Living Solutions, a San Francisco-based productivity and organizing consulting firm, specializing in helping busy people save time, space and money by getting organized at home and at work. For more FREE organizing ideas, visit www.customlivingsolutions.com or call 415-830-6345.
© 2009 Joshua Zerkel and Custom Living Solutions. All Rights Reserved.
 4 Tips for Easier Emailing
Do you feel like email has taken over your life? Well, you’re not alone – in a recent study by Information Week, over three-quarters of the people surveyed said that email is essential to their lives – and an additional 15% say they’d rather lose their spouse than give up email! It’s important to remember that email is a tool that we can control – one that is meant to improve communication and make our lives easier. To that end, here are four top tips to wrangle that inbox:
- Smarten up your subject line. Put as much descriptive information in the subject line as possible, and your recipient will know what your message is about without having to even open your email. For instance, “Rescheduling Meeting: Orig. 6/1/07 3PM - New 6/1/07 5PM” is a lot better than “Meeting time changed” – the more descriptive, the better.
- Don’t use your inbox as a filing cabinet. Instead, create descriptive folders in your email program – by topic, client, vendor, etc. As you’re finished reading your messages, file them accordingly.
- Filter your messages to save a step. Once you’ve set up some folders, you can then tell your email program to automatically put messages from specific senders or with specific subject lines into the folders where they belong. For instance, if you’re receiving dozens of newsletters, create a “Newsletters” folder, and have your email program filter those emails right into the folder, bypassing your inbox entirely. In your email program, search the help for “rules” or “filters” for more instructions.
- Beware the 4000-message inbox. Instead of letting emails “pile up” in your inbox indefinitely, set a limit for how many messages you want to have sit in there at any given time – I recommend no more than 25 or so (once you have more than that, it’s hard to actually see what’s in there). Once your messages start growing past the limit that you set, schedule some time to process your email.
Joshua Zerkel, CPO® is a the founder of Custom Living Solutions, a San Francisco-based productivity and organizing consulting firm, specializing in helping busy people save time, space and money by getting organized at home and at work. For more FREE organizing ideas, visit www.customlivingsolutions.com or call 415-830-6345.
© 2009 Joshua Zerkel and Custom Living Solutions. All Rights Reserved.
My friends get pretty jealous about me having an office in my home, saying it must be cool to be able to sit around in my sweats and do all sorts of errands during the day. Well, while there are definite perks to working from home – spending nothing on gas (a big benefit in $4/gallon San Francisco) and eating a healthy lunch that I prepare – it’s important to remember the work part in the work-from-home equation. For most of us with home offices, it’s key to our success to find ways to put the “office” back in “home office.”
Reduce distractions. Here’s a scenario: even though you hate doing laundry, as soon as you sit down to start your workday, suddenly your laundry jumps to the top of your must-do list. You get out of your chair, collect your laundry, sort it, put it in the machine, and before you know it, you’ve lost 20 minutes that was supposed to be spent on an important project. Sound familiar? Most of us have distractions in our homes that can divert our attention from the work that we have in front of us. For us work-at-homers, it’s super-important to combat these distractions. True, we can’t make them go away, but look for ways to shift your focus back to your work. For instance, putting all non-work-related items out view of your desk, closing the door to your office, and turning off the ringer on your home phone during the day have all proven helpful to people I’ve worked with.
Set the scene. Is your home office set up to help you do your best work? If it isn’t, take some time to get the space organized, comfortable, and conducive for how you like to work. For instance, if you have trouble getting started each day because you can’t find your papers, take an afternoon and set up a paper management system. Are your frequently-used supplies all the way on the other side of the room? Move them closer so you spend less time getting up and interrupting your workflow. Does the space itself reflect your personal aesthetic? How things look and feel can play a big part in how much (or how little) we like our workspace, and when we like our space, we do better work. Spend some time “dressing up” your work area or desk with items that reflect who you are and the things you like.
Dress for work, not for home. Even though it might seem working in your home office in pajamas or sweats is a good idea (you’re already wearing them, right?), doing so doesn’t lend itself to enhancing your productivity or helping you do your best work. Your pajamas may be silk and your sweats designer, but chances are you’d never see a client or go to an office wearing these decidedly not-work garments. Dressing up helps us shift our mind into another state – in this case, dressing for work helps make the mental shift into work mode. I’ve seen people work much better when they dress as if they may be called off to a client site at any moment. For example, a client says when she puts on her shoes, she knows it’s time for her to go to work (even though her office is just down the hall from her bedroom). What outfit can you change into to signal work time?
Find the things that you can do, whether it’s putting on a dress shirt or closing your office door, to create a physical or mental “workspace” that is distinct from your home. When you do, you’ll find yourself being much more productive and enjoy your work more.
Joshua Zerkel, CPO® is a the founder of Custom Living Solutions, a San Francisco-based productivity and organizing consulting firm, specializing in helping busy people save time, space and money by getting organized at home and at work. For more FREE organizing ideas, visit www.customlivingsolutions.com or call 415-830-6345.
© 2009 Joshua Zerkel and Custom Living Solutions. All Rights Reserved.
One of the things I frequently work with clients on is making sure that their data will be safe in the event of an emergency. Just imagine what would happen in your business or your life if you lost all your data and your key documents. Unless you’re confident that you could re-create everything from scratch, it’s essential to have a strategy for data and information backup and restoration. Here are some ideas for how to do it:
Snap it. For insurance and recordkeeping purposes, you need to have a record of all of your belongings. Start by taking your camcorder or digital camera and going through every space in your office or home, and take snapshots of the contents. I mean open every closet, ever drawer – everything. Download the photos to your computer and store them in a special folder. As your belongings change, make sure to take new photos to keep your record up-to-date.
Data backup. If you have any data on your computer that you value in any way, it’s essential to develop a backup strategy. Most businesses and individuals don’t backup their data regularly, which in our digital age is a very risky thing to do! Backup is really simple with automated tools like MOZY (http://bit.ly/cls-mozy) or Dropbox (http://bit.ly/cls-dropbox), which backup your data to a central server and keep synched copies of your data on all your computers, respectively. Whatever backup strategy you choose, just choose something and do it regularly!
Centralize your docs. In an emergency, you may need access to important documents like lease agreements, insurance papers, deeds and titles, and more. If you need to leave your home or office in a hurry, you won’t generally have time to search your files to gather everything. Use something like the Vital Records PortaVault (http://bit.ly/cls-vitalrecords) to centralize your key documents so that you can grab what you need. You may even want to keep one copy in your office and one copy in your home, so that if you can’t return to one location you can still access your documents.
There are many things you can do to help prepare yourself for an emergency at home or at work. Being prepared is all about being ready – and the more ready you are, the better you’ll fare in the event of an emergency.
Joshua Zerkel, CPO® is a the founder of Custom Living Solutions, a San Francisco-based productivity and organizing consulting firm, specializing in helping busy people save time, space and money by getting organized at home and at work. For more FREE organizing ideas, visit www.customlivingsolutions.com or call 415-830-6345.
© 2009 Joshua Zerkel and Custom Living Solutions. All Rights Reserved.
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