Office Space and Remote Work in the “New Normal”

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Apex Business Advisors: Office Space and Remote WorkThe COVID-19 epidemic has had far reaching consequences for businesses worldwide, some of which remain to be discovered. But when businesses were forced to close, commercial real estate took a big hit. As the lockdown continues and businesses adjust, a new normal has begun to take shape. This may shape the direction of commercial real estate and how companies work for a generations.

Pre-Covid

Before Covid-19, commercial real estate continued record year-on-year growth. With steady cash flows, it provided an attractive investment alternative for conservative investors to corporate debt. The returns were significantly higher, but with only slightly more risk.

While remote work had been steadily growing, it wasn’t growing at anywhere close to the demand for commercial real estate space. And remote work didn’t show any signs of hockey stick growth in the near future. There were companies that publicly stated seeing great value in their teams physically working together and had no interest in moving to remote work.

Changes

Needless to say, those companies who resisted remote work found themselves with no choices in the face of governmental orders. Overnight, people who had no idea that “Slack” was a software program or that “Zoom” was something you used to meet with others got acquainted with both of them, and many other programs.

Then days turned into weeks and many of those managers’ concerns turned into unexpected surprise. Their teams were perfectly capable of working online, despite having never done so before. It wasn’t perfect, and maybe it wouldn’t be a forever solution, but a line had been crossed that couldn’t be uncrossed.

This led to serious thoughts for business owners who routinely cut five and six figure monthly rent checks. Why pay for all this space if my team can effectively work from home? It left them free to rethink the future of their office space.

Post-Covid

One of those shifts in office space could be re-imagining it as a place for meeting clients and for occasional team meetings. There could be some dedicated shared space for various team members who still wish to come in to a separate office. For some companies, this wouldn’t necessarily change their footprint that much. For other companies, it would be game-changing. Freeing up revenue to spend on attracting customers or building products during a particularly challenging economic climate.

With a change in the footprint of their office space, there will need to be more acceptance of the culture of remote work and incorporation into how the company does business. No more painful minutes spent learning Zoom on the fly. There will be established systems and procedures that existing and new employees have to understand. And they will be trained to make sure that the new remote version of the company is as good or better than the pre-Covid version.

Instead of waiting for things to go “back to normal” (whatever that means) the best business owners are proactively managing the situation as it unfolds. They’re not content to be passive receivers of changes. They are dealing with the changing landscape with flexibility. They’re anticipating all that might come with the knowledge of what’s happened in first half of 2020.

Are you thinking about making changes to how your team works and how your office is configured? We know people who can help. Give us a call!

Five Steps to Selling a Business

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Apex Business Advisors: Five Steps to Selling a BusinessAnother article about selling a business? Well, we’re business brokers, so we believe in stressing the fundamentals. A business sale is often the most significant transaction an individual participates in during his/her lifetime. And those who master the fundamentals have the most successful transactions.

Step One: Assemble Your Team

There are four key team members you should have assisting you in your transaction:

  • Accountant – This should preferably be the accountant that you have always had working on your company’s finances. But in case he/she doesn’t have the bandwidth/desire to assist you with this task, you might bring in someone else with experience in business sales and tax strategies.
  • Financial Planner – This person should work hand-in-hand with your accountant to figure out what to do with your free-and-clear proceeds that result from the sale. They can often offer you strategies to maximize value and lessen tax exposure.
  • Attorney – Someone to represent your legal interests in the transaction. If you don’t have a trusted resource in this department, we have trusted partners we can refer you to that we work with often.
  • Business Broker – We’re going to help make sure this team is pulling in the right direction. Most of all, we’re going to help you stay focused and on track towards the closing date.

This team is what you’ll need for most Main Street (less than $5M annual revenues) transactions, but it can definitely expand as the transaction size increases, to help cover the increased diligence issues.

Step Two: Prepare Your Paperwork

Before selling your business, you can get ahead of the game by asking your broker to get you a diligence checklist for a business that is in your industry or comparable in revenues. The longer you have to work on this list, the less it will seem like term papers of long ago and more like a simple marathon with milestones you keep hitting.

Step Three: Think About Deal Points

There’s no way for you to anticipate what a person buying a business will have as his/her “must haves”. But you can certainly make your own list, as well as your own “red lines” that you won’t cross. Keep in mind that this needs to be a discussion you have with your broker. In your own mind, “must haves” can be very serious, and red lines can be very red indeed. But that might be simply because we’re lacking context or don’t have information about alternative ways to proceed.

There are thousands of ways to get a deal done (we’ve seen most of them!) so if you’re proactive, your mind will be in “deal” mode when you start dealing with a buyer. That means you’re flexible. Flexibility often wins in transactions of all kinds, not just in business sales.

Step Four: Look at Comps

Your business may be worth a certain number in your mind. We always remind our clients that their business is only worth what someone will pay for it during the particular time period your business goes to market. Start with a professional valuation, then talk to your broker about current supply and demand in the market for comparable businesses.

What kind of deals are getting done right now and how does that relate to me and my business?

Step Five: Stay the Course

The deal is not done until the paperwork is completed and the check clears. Period.

Make sure that you have operational support as you’re going through this process. Working on a business sale is a part-time job. You want to make sure that your company doesn’t suffer as a result of doing all the things we’ve discussed above to move towards a successful transaction. If you need help, ask. If you’re struggling, tell your broker. But you don’t have to do this alone, and it’s okay to admit you need help.

Do you feel like it might be time to sell your business? Let’s talk about it!

Business in 2020: Catching a Falling Knife

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Here at Apex, we’ve been proactive in advising our clients as 2020 has unfolded. We began the year by discussing issues that might come in an election year. As the first wave of lockdowns occurred we encouraged people to look at federal funds (and followed up with detailed information on PPP). As the lockdowns continued we shared our long term outlook (don’t panic) while offering short-term changes that could help businesses adapt to the continuing chaos.

But now it’s the second half of 2020 and there’s no “normal” in sight.  What now?

We’ve heard many business owners say “2020 is a write-off.” While we understand that thinking, there’s also a danger in the phrase… It assumes that events know when December 31st comes and hence switch off just because it’s a new year. A new year may be something that we as humans pop champagne over, but the universe is indifferent. It just keeps going. Hence, with months of an unprecedented business climate, we should have more wisdom under our belts, and more importantly, we should use that wisdom.

Our position at Apex is unchanged. We look at the fundamentals and the transactions that we continue to handle. Our business has not stopped. There are still buyers and sellers looking to do deals. Every industry is different. While food and beverage and entertainment may be tougher to sell at the moment (yet some of them still continue to move), some businesses have temporarily put their listings on hold as they experience record years.

However, your position may have changed.

Leaving the Corporate World

You may have been someone who was already looking to leave the corporate world and enter business ownership, but now you have cold feet.  Is having a job any more secure in this environment? While business owners are indeed facing challenges, they do so knowing they have the most control over their destinies. They can live and die by that self-determination, and that’s preferable to waiting for an ax to fall. Does COVID-19 really change whether a business is the best vehicle to determine your own destiny?

Selling a Business

You might have been someone looking to sell a business. You still need to do what’s necessary to prepare that business for sale. And that includes guiding it through challenging circumstances. As we’ve discussed before, companies who showed good performance in 2009 and 2010, following the 2008 financial crisis, made for even more attractive acquisition targets. Those companies showed resilience, not just doing well when the sun was shining, but when the storms hit. Has COVID-19 changed your desire to sell your business, or just demanded more perseverance and resilience from you?

Falling Knives

In this second half of the year, we aren’t waiting for events to “happen to” our clients. We are encouraging them to take matters into their own hands. If it feels like you’re trying to catch a falling knife, get some gloves on and reach those mitts out. Success in life doesn’t come to those who passively wait in fear for the next disaster, but those who, amidst setbacks and challenges, fill sandbags for what may come next. They keep their eyes on their environment close and far, watching for opportunities.

Feeling paralyzed about what to do in 2020? Talk to one of our advisors. While this is all of our first time through COVID-19, it’s not our first major financial shock. We have great advice and guidance for you.

Book Club #23: Tribe of Mentors, by Tim Ferriss

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Tribe of Mentors, by Tim FerrissTim Ferriss is most known for his bestselling The Four Hour Work Week, but most recently has been compiling books that have been enabled by his top-rated podcast. The newest one is Tribe of Mentors, which has the subtitle of “Short Life Advice from the Best in the World.” At almost 600 pages, the book is not meant to be read straight through, but in 4-5 page increments as you peruse the answers to a set of questions Tim posed to one hundred different high achievers.

The Questions

Not every person answers every question listed below, and some bend and re-frame the question to go down a more interesting path, but to give you a frame of reference, here they are:

  • What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?
  • What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)? 
  • How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?
  • If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it — metaphorically speaking, getting a message out to millions or billions — what would it say and why? It could be a few words or a paragraph. 
  • What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made? (Could be an investment of money, time, energy, etc.)
  • What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
  • In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?
  • What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore?
  • What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?
  • In the last five years, what have you become better at saying ‘no’ to?
  • When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, or have lost your focus temporarily, what do you do? (If helpful: What questions do you ask yourself?)

The Answers

We obviously can’t go through all the many answers that were given in the book, but here are a few.

On Advice to Recent Grads

Developer of “smart contracts” and the precursor to Bitcoin, Bit Gold, Nick Szabo offers the following: “The less you need positive feedback on your ideas, the more original design regions you can explore, and the more creative and, in the long term, useful to society you will be.” Unlike the “plastics!” advice of previous generations, this challenges those coming up in society to be willing to take more risks.

Ben Silbermann, CEO and co-founder of Pinterest, adds: “I feel like a lot of people in Silicon Valley serialize their lives. They think, ‘First I’ll do college. Then I’ll do a startup. Then I’ll make money. Then I’ll do X.’ There’s some truth in that approach, but most of the most important stuff has to be parallel-processed, like your relationships and your health, because you can’t make up the time by doing more of it later. You can’t neglect your wife for four years and then say, ‘Okay, now it’s my wife years.’

Relationships don’t work that way, and neither does your health or your fitness…Figuring out a system, so that the stuff you need to do all the time happens, even while you might be placing disproportionate focus on one thing, is pretty important. Otherwise, you’ll be setting yourself up to be lonely and unhealthy in your future.”

On New Beliefs

Arianna Huffington became more intentional with her time: “Before, I separated time into work time and non-work time, and I always wanted to maximize work time. Now I realize that you can’t separate the two — time spent taking breaks, taking a walk, unplugging, meditating — that’s all work time, too, in the sense that time spent unplugging and recharging makes me better, more effective, and happier in my work and in my life.” 

Saying No

Josh Waitzkin, a chess prodigy whose life was the basis for the film Searching for Bobby Fischer, has an extreme take on saying “no” more often: “I say no to just about everything public. I say no to more than 99 percent of professional opportunities that people approach me with.” This is echoed by tech founder Muneeb Ali later in the book: “External meetings should be initiated by me…and not initiated by others.” Now, not all of us are as busy as these people might be, but surely we could audit how and where we are spending our time to be of greater personal benefit to ourselves and those we love.

Regaining Focus when Overwhelmed

Maria Sharapova shared a quote of Hal Boyle’s to help her when she’s feeling lost or unfocused: “What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt – it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.”  

Of course there are literally hundreds more answers in the book, and if you’d like to listen to some of them free, you can check some of them out in the short audio series Tim released just for the book. 

In the meantime, it might be a fun exercise to do these questions yourself and share them with your friends and colleagues.  You’ll learn plenty about yourself and them in doing so.