Greg Kells is the Founder and President of Sunbelt Canada, the number one business brokerage in the country. He has directly facilitated the sale of over 1,000 businesses and is a two-time winner of Businessperson of the Year in Ottawa. Greg is passionate about mentoring and teaching, with experience as a guest lecturer at Harvard, Yale, Duke, and various colleges across Canada. He is active in numerous community organizations and advocates for economic empowerment, the environment, science, and technology.
How many of you remember Victor Kiam, the businessman who liked his Remington shaver so much he bought the company? Well, the three Inner Circles I experienced in the U.S. impressed me so much that I bought the company – at least the Canadian Master Franchise.
Business brokers bring buyers and sellers together. The rules around “who acts for whom” change with the Canada/U.S. border. In Canada, individual business brokers often represent the interests of both the buyer and the seller of a business. This is known as dual agency.
Are you taking, or have you already taken, a vacation away from your business this year? As a business owner myself, I know how hard it can be to step away. And provided you enjoy what you’re doing, the workload seems much lighter than it actually is. I touch on this in tips for baby boom buyers. Sometimes you don’t even notice how much energy you’re expending.
All things being equal, higher revenue and a better bottom line increase the value of a business and its appeal to potential buyers. How we get there will be the focus of our next few posts. But first, I’d like to take a short detour. I recently read Good to Great, written by Jim Collins. What follows is a summary of his concepts for taking your business and business worth from good to great.
In the last post, we talked about financing the purchase of a business through a bank loan (unlikely), through a Canada Small Business Loan (CSBL), a hybrid structure using a CSBL, and a seller note (preferred choice). Today we’ll explore other approaches.
There is a general misconception about the availability of financing for the purchase/sale of a small business, especially where the purchase price includes significant goodwill: banks do not want to finance these transactions.
While the tests for determining whether a sale of shares does or does not qualify for the exemption are technical, a rule of thumb is that the corporation must be operating an active, rather than passive, business and the assets owned by the corporation at the time of sale must generally be assets used in the active business.
You wouldn’t head out on a family road trip without checking your car and local weather forecast would you? There are many actions available to reduce the risks when embarking on the buying or selling of a business. Adequate protection through insurance is high on our checklist.
Although our one-cent coin has been retired, those of us in business can still bank on the premise “a penny saved is a penny earned”. And we don’t want to pay out one penny more than we have to in taxes.
The Process of Selling a Business