Importance of Due Diligence in Buying a Business

June 29, 2010


Whether you are buying a business for the first time or you have purchased and sold number of businesses you cannot underestimate the importance of due diligence before signing on that dotted line. The mistake made at this stage can not only be costly in terms of financial losses; but it will get you stuck with bad business for a long time.
So what is due diligence? Due diligence is the process of looking at the business you are planning to purchase from multiple angles to verify that the financials match with what the seller promised earlier. Presumably, you have already done your homework in terms of market analysis, competition, and future potential before putting an offer with the seller. The due diligence comes into picture after the seller has agreed to your offer. It is usually one of the last steps in the buying process before you start preparing the closing documents.
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Filed Under: Buyers, Finance, Management, Operations, Purchasing, Sales Tagged With: , , , ,

5 Proven Ways to Reduce Credit Card Processing Fees

June 3, 2010


Most small businesses are overpaying for credit card processing. After the Mafia was eliminated from Italy this has become the next legitimate way of extorting money from businesses. Visa and Master Card are making billions of dollars in profit every year just for acting as a middle man to process the credit cards.
Is there anything businesses can do to lower this cost rather than just give this “extortion” money to credit card processing companies? Although there is no way you can eliminate this cost; there are few steps you can take to bring it down. Here are 5 steps you can explore:
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How to Overcome Challenges of Starting a Business in Bad Times

June 1, 2010


In our previous blog post Is this a Good Time to Buy a Business we argued that the difficult economic times present an excellent opportunity to start a business. There are a number of advantages and opportunities that bad economy; like current one; provides. The advantages include less competition, good talent available at reasonable salary and others.
While it is true that this is a good time to start a new business you cannot ignore the challenges that you will be facing in starting business in bad economic time. By understanding the challenges and preparing yourself to meet them head-on you will improve your success rate. Here are three most difficult challenges in our mind along with suggestions on how to overcome them.
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Filed Under: Buyers, Employees, Finance, Management Tagged With: , , ,

How to Succeed at Multi-unit Operations

May 26, 2010


Despite its lure of higher sales and profit the multi-unit operation is hard work and can be prone to failure. If you are not careful you may end up losing it all. In our previous blog we laid out the pros and cons of multi-unit operations. Here we will outline some of the steps you can take to make multi-unit operation succeed. I will say it again – operating multi-unit business is challenging. At the same time if you take care of the pitfalls that come with it you can not only succeed; but thrive.

The basic philosophy you have to adopt when moving from single unit to multi-unit operation is to take advantage of your scale; while at the same time standardize and apply the proven formula at multiple locations. These are the principles behind the concept of franchise; which is essentially multi-unit operation on steroids. If you want to learn how to succeed at multi-unit business; study how any franchise you operates.

Let’s look at the steps you need to take in more detail:

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Filed Under: Employees, Finance, Management, Purchasing Tagged With: , ,

5 Reasons to Establish Partnership

May 17, 2010


The failure rate of businesses with partnership is much higher than those managed without partnership. So why would anyone want to get in the partnership? Despite what statistics shows there are some valid reasons why you should consider establishing partnership. As I mentioned in my previous blog there are pros and cons of partnerships. As long as you take steps to make it work you can get what you want out of partnership.
Here are 5 reasons why you should consider getting into partnership. In some cases there may be multiple scenarios depending on the situation and number of partners involved.
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Filed Under: Buyers, Finance, Management Tagged With: , ,