Presentations & Workshops

17 Ways to Make Your Company More Valuable – Workshop
If you’re planning to sell your company, you naturally want to increase its value. But how do you do that? This workshop will measure your business against the 17 factors buyers use to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of acquisition candidates. If your company ranks high, buyers will value it highly. But if it compares unfavorably to industry standards, buyers are likely to pass you by or give you a low-ball offer. The 17 factors will be used to develop a strategic plan for your company that will increase its market values substantially. The 17 factors fall into four categories: (1) financial factors, (2) customer and contract factors, (3) product and service offering factors, and (4) management and staffing factors.

Integrating an Exit Plan into Your Strategic Plan -Workshop
This roll-up-the-sleeves presentation explores the pros and cons, and actions required to prepare a company for the six exit options available to business owners:

Transfer ownership to a family member(s)
Sell the company to an employee(s)
Sell the business to a strategic or financial buyer
Become an absentee owner
Liquidate the company (i.e., sell assets individually)
Run the company until they die!

The presentation is liberally spiced with stories about business owners who have successfully or unsuccessfully prepared their companies for an orderly and profitable exit, including some who chose option #6 by default. Participants will be encouraged to pick exit alternatives and integrate them into their strategic plan because it’s never too early to start planning their exit.

Development of Family Wealth Plan - Workshop
Have you ever wondered why the Rothschild families’ fortune has lasted hundreds of years while other family fortunes have all but disappeared? The answer is that families such as the Rothschilds developed a strategic plan that facilitates the growth of the family assets and protects those assets from business or personal disasters. A family wealth plan will not only minimize the potential tax liabilities on the sale of your business, but can reduce the estate tax liabilities imposed on the current and subsequent generations. To maximize the benefit of this type of strategic planning, it should be implemented months, if not years, before selling a business. Since no one can predict the future, the best way to minimize the negative effects of an uncertain future is to be prepared with a long-term, flexible strategic plan. Not every business owner should structure their plan the same way because each individual and family has different needs. In order to meet these needs, the plan must be customized to you and your families needs, but maintain flexibility to address changing situations. This workshop will combine real-life stories with a presentation on planning alternatives to help business owners keep more money in their pockets and to protect their assets for themselves and their family.

Avoiding Organizational A-D-D -Workshop
This engaging presentation causes CEOs to examine their behaviors and determine the extent to which they create organizational Attention Deficit Disorder (A-D-D) in their companies. CEOs frequently blame others for not reaching the company’s performance goals, but organizational A-D-D may be the real cause. The symptoms of organizational A-D-D include:

Strategic initiatives that never get completed
Ad hoc decisions about pricing, hiring, and salaries
Erratic business development priorities and actions
Personnel policies that are outdated and not followed
Lack of written procedures for project and financial management

Today’s employees need to be led more than managed. When urgent but unimportant things divert their attention from strategically vital tasks, organizational A-D-D is usually the cause. The cure is for the CEO to clarify the team’s goals, provide the required resources, and get out of the way! The highly interactive nature of the presentation enables each CEO to recognize his/her own behaviors and habits that may contribute to organizational A-D-D.

Developing the Management Team in Exit Planning - Workshop
A business owner’s leadership is critical to a business’s success, but not having a strong management team to carry on after the owner’s departure will reduce the value of the business on its sale or transfer. Generally, lack of a strong management team handcuffs the business as employees wait for the owner to make decisions, which means the company flounders; or key employees leave as they become frustrated in their roles. Buyers will devalue a business if they believe it cannot be sustained without the owner. Buyers also may also devalue a business if they believe that they cannot retain key managers after the owner leaves. This seminar combines real-life stories of success and failure with practical strategies that present business owners with a better understanding of the role of management in exit planning in transferring equity ownership to retain management, planning for vesting equity ownership, using redemption of employee equity to prevent former employee’s bad acts, and other issues related to assessing management in an exit plan.

Selling Your Business - Workshop
To maximize the after-tax return on the sale of your business, you need to take the following steps:
Make sure you have the legal protections and agreements in place that a purchaser will want
Identify who would be the best purchaser for your business
Determine your goals regarding the sales proceeds
Understand the types of payments for your business, and the income and estate tax consequences of each type
Minimize the income and estate tax consequences or protect the sales proceeds from creditors, there are actions you need to take before the sale process is started
This workshop discusses these issues and allows you to make informed decisions in selecting the alternatives that will maximize the after-tax return on the sale of your business.

Taming The Dragons of Change — Presentation or Workshop
Is your organization facing a significant change?
Do your senior managers feel uneasy about the change?
Will some of them resist it either passively or aggressively?
If you answered YES to these questions, use this presentation to increase
the probability that the change will be successful and relatively painless.

Future Changes - Presentation
A thought-provoking look at 10 business changes heading our way. Today’s global economy is unlike anything we’ve ever seen, and the common threads are 10 Future Changes. That is, changes which are just beginning but won’t reach their peak impact for several years. The presentation will encourage you to consider the ten changes from two perspectives. First, as potential business opportunities for entrepreneurial companies; and second, as changes that will forever transform how you do business. The presentation will stimulate the audience to anticipate, embrace, and use the ten future changes in innovative ways to advance their company and their career.