The Value of Goodwill

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The Value of GoodwillGoodwill is part of many transactions we do here at Apex. The best businesses have it in spades, and they are able to incorporate it into their valuation and their final deals. But like company culture, it is created in many different, not easily traceable ways. In this article, we will talk about some of the more obvious paths to goodwill in your business.

Reputation and Name Recognition

Many new business owners dream of the day when someone they don’t know will say, “I’ve heard of your business” when they speak to a stranger. It means that the business is a reference point in the community. It’s a barrier that competitors have to deal with and one that you control.

Good location

Location isn’t the most important thing for every business, but no one ever says, “I wish I had a worse location.” Visibility matters.

Custom-built factory/tooling/designs

Another barrier for your competitors to surmount is designs and tooling that cannot be easily or quickly duplicated. It gives you an edge with clients who don’t just want a generic looking product and it can allow you to command a premium price.

Loyal Customers and a Mailing List

When we say mailing list, we mean both postal and email. They have come back and become valuable as our society has shifted in the way it communicates for business and personal motives. The lists are not just valuable for the people you reach, but a mailing list can tell you where your customers live (and where you don’t have any customers) so that you can think more critically about your marketing and product offering.

As for loyal customers, there’s really nothing like them. They often are just as attached to the brand as to the owner, and as long as the new owner continues the best practices the old owner put in place, they will continue to spread your name around town.

Contracts

Recurring revenue is a good thing… having a contract for it is even better. Contracts are trust personified. It shows you are someone that people feel comfortable doing business with.

Great Staff and a Supplier List

Customers will often be loyal because you have a great team who deliver a good experience. Great staff who are doing work they enjoy will often very happily stay on and work for a new owner. A good supplier list is helpful as well. Often, business owners learn the hard way and have to remove bad vendors over time. A new owner has the comfort of knowing the list is vetted.

Trademarks, Copyrights, and Trade Secrets

This could be a great web address, a smart slogan, or the special herbs and spices that make what you have something that people have to have. Very often they are just best practices that an owner insisted on until it occurs to him/her just what a differentiator they were in the marketplace. In an ever more service-based economy, intellectual property (and legally securing it) really matters.

Curious about the goodwill in your business and how it can relate to a valuation of what your company is worth?  Give us a call today so we can chat about it!

Warning Signs in Your Business

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Warning SignMany people, for better or worse, avoid going to the doctor. No news is good news or if they feel fine all must be fine. But often there will at least be some kind of warning sign to nudge you to seek help. It may not be serious or life threatening, but it’s enough to get your attention.

This happens in business as well. In this article we will talk about a few of these that should make you pay attention.

Missing Revenue Targets

All businesses have bills to pay and if you don’t hit your revenue targets you may be in a more and more compromised financial position. You may start to rely on credit card debt or some of the higher priced alternative financing options out there. This can lead to a challenging situation if managed from a position of stress without foresight. Instead of limiting your liability to your corporate obligations, you may be putting your personal assets at risk as well.
Why are you missing your projections and what can you do to fix the situation?

Health Problems

Sometimes we have health problems because of genetic dispositions or because of choices we have made outside of the business. But on many occasions we’ve heard stories about health problems directly related to a business. The stress you are dealing with has to go somewhere, and sometimes it’s inflicted on your body, with devastating results.
If your business is causing you health problems, what are you going to change?

Loss of Passion

Many of us get into a particular business not just because we are good at it, but because we happen to enjoy it and find meaning in it. But sometimes, for various reasons, we lose our mojo. Very often it’s because of burnout.
If you’ve lost your passion for your business, can you keep it going?

Loss of Mission

While it’s true that businesses pivot to deliver something slightly (or greatly) different from where they may have first started, sometimes in the excitement to build and extend, a mission can get lost or muddled. These effects are felt throughout the business: from customers who aren’t sure exactly what you do, to staff who are confused about the change in direction, to you, who repeat what you think the mission of the company is but which has no basis in the reality of what your company is doing day to day.
If your company isn’t mission-focused, how will you correct that?

Key Staff are Leaving

If you don’t see the writing on the wall, sometimes your staff will. And when it’s key staff that leave, it’s the hardest to take, as they are the hardest to replace. They leave with institutional knowledge that is hard to pass on, and worse, they are probably leaving for preventable reasons.
If you’re losing key staff, are you willing to take a hard look at who the problem may be? (Is it you?)

If any of these are an issue for you, that’s cause for concern. If you have more than one, you’re in a crisis and need some help. If you want to rebuild and keep going, it’s possible, but it’s going to take a lot of work. But it may also be a good turnaround opportunity for one of our opportunistic buyers and can offer you a light at the end of the tunnel instead of just a longer tunnel. Give us a call to see if we can help.

3 Stupid Tax Mistakes

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Tax MistakesIt’s that time of year in America when taxes are on our minds. When we get to pay the government for the privilege of providing fellow citizens with jobs, supporting the economy, doing something that matters to our community, etc. However you might feel about the tax system in general, one thing you shouldn’t do is make stupid tax mistakes, especially with your business. We can tell you we’ve seen them all, multiple times, and they will usually bring any sale to a screeching halt.

Not paying taxes

Small business owners have cash crunches at times, and it can be tempting to take money from any available source. One of the most obvious places is the withholding for your employees. Many small businesses don’t use a payroll service and  are responsible for paying the withholding to the IRS on a timely basis. Instead of doing that, they “borrow” the money that isn’t theirs. This never, ever works out well.

Worse, if you do have a payroll company that files timely reports, the IRS will be immediately notice the discrepancy between the filings and what has been deposited and you’ll get some lovely new fines and penalties to go along with what was already due.

Other small business owners don’t pay their estimated taxes, or fail to even regularly file taxes. If they’re thinking the government won’t notice… they will.

Inventory games

Inventory is only deductible when you sell it, and sometimes people want to make their balance sheet look better, so they fidget with the value of their inventory to “create” tax savings. Then they change inventory values back the following year. Sometimes they lose track of what they’ve done, and now the books don’t just look bad in the case of an audit, any potential buyer will be confused as well. Their suspicions will be rightfully aroused as to what else might be not quite right in the business. Check the new tax law to see if you’re eligible to treat inventory differently. Some businesses now are.

Have Low Revenues or Consistently Poor Profitability

We often say we’ve “seen it all” here at APEX, but the IRS has truly seen it all. The difference is that they have the legal power to make you pay for your mistakes, whereas we can only cringe around the office.

Suspiciously low revenues or consistent significant pass-through losses, especially in S-corporations, are blinking red lights that say, “Come audit me!” There are better ways to make tax savings than using a corporation beyond the limits of the fairly generous tax allowances that we get in the US.

Every business is different and has its own set of challenges. But they all answer to the IRS. And the lesson we’ve taken from dealing with so many businesses and transactions year after year is that taxes are what Mark Twain said they were years ago: as inevitable as death.

Have you made some of these mistakes but are hoping to sell your business?  We can connect you with the right people to get these issues handled so we can help your business go to market. Give us a call today.

Cautionary Tale #3: The Answer You Want Isn’t Always The Answer You Need

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Questions and AnswersThis is a continuing series of stories we want to share with our clients so they don’t make the same very costly mistakes.

One of the many reasons you hire a business broker to help guide you through a sale is because we will tell you important truths without fear. We want a successful transaction and that can’t be done by hiding things or not being fully truthful. But that sometimes means that a client will want an answer you simply can’t give.

One of our clients had retired from a twenty year career in a field, and had decided to get into a food franchise. The first location that he picked was about thirty minutes from his home, so he had a general manager in place. The location wasn’t losing money, but it wasn’t making money at the rate he expected.

He also bought a second location of the franchise much closer to his house, which he had great expectations for. He wanted to get rid of the old location so he could focus all his energies on the second location. There was a problem, though. He didn’t have a sellable business.

There are many reasons to buy a franchise, but once you’ve committed and bought one, you simply have to put in the work.

Because the business wasn’t in a strong position, the sale price wouldn’t clear the debt that already existed. This meant that the deal couldn’t be financed. Worse, he still had an existing lease obligation that had some strings attached.

We told him the numbers had to be better so that we could help him sell his business. He disagreed.

Not only did he disagree, he went around asking for second and third opinions. Word kept coming back to us from friends and colleagues that he wanted someone to look at his business and give him the answer he wanted. We couldn’t give him that answer because it would have been a waste of everyone’s time.

Any business owner starts with dreams about possibilities. But once the business starts in earnest, those dreams meet with reality. Once you are ready for a sale, that reality has to pass the smell test of our team here at Apex before we will put it out on the market with our name behind it.

Sometimes, having a broker serves the purpose of telling you that you don’t have a business that’s ready to sell…yet. But if you take our advice about what to improve, you can have one sooner than you think. But that means you have to be willing to hear the answer you need, not the answer you want.

Want to avoid being part of a cautionary tale?  Give us a call so we can discuss implementing better systems in your business so you’ll be in a position to sell when you want.