What about owning a small business that only operates at certain times of the year—say a tour boat line in Canada? I saw an article recently about owning a seasonal franchise and it prompted me to put together my own list of pros and cons to owning a seasonal business that buyers should be aware of.
Jumping into a pool isn't top of mind for most of us as we hunker down to face our Canadian winter. But that's one of the things my team and I were thinking about earlier this week as we learned about the traits and preferences of the four DISC personality types. Our training leader (Grant Mellow of ActionCOACH) used the pool analogy to help us grasp the differences between each so we could recognize them and adapt.
My wife, Gayle, and I recently celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary. We're both strong-minded but we're careful not to let our differences turn into a contest of wills, where one "wins" and the other "loses".
Some 52% of Canadians go online to research products, says the November issue of Profit magazine. If your store doesn’t have an effective web presence, you’re going to sacrifice sales, they add. And yet, many small businesses in Canada still don’t have a website. Only 36 per cent of small businesses had their own websites (compared to 91 per cent of large businesses) as of 2007, a recent CBC article reports. Surprised? I’m not.
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.
The Process of Selling a Business