Can you actually thrive in an industry you don’t know much about? According to Erik Van Horn, former franchise owner of Sola Salon Studios, you sure can. Achieving his success as a franchise owner always looking for the next deal, Van Horn stumbled across the salon industry in 2014. Though a new-found territory, Van Horn and [...]
By 2021, Baby Boomers will be retiring at a pace of 11,000 per day. That is 77 million people or 20% of the US population. Many of these Boomers are business owners ready to sell. What that means is the current seller’s market will flip to a buyer’s market. There will be an over abundance of [...]
Kenan Hopkins founded his delivery food service company, Blue Ridge To Go, with no real management skills, no idea how to run a business, a lump of personal credit card debt, and the worst branding ever – all his words. Though off to a rough start, he was able to transform his messy company into a [...]
Ottawa-based phone company Versature was acquired by net2phone in the fall of last year. In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, you’ll hear Versature co-founder Jonathan Moody describe: The surprising downside of offering too many things The impact your geographic location can have on the value of your company How Moody and his partners survived [...]
If you’re a service provider, it can be difficult to separate the service from the provider. Your customers might demand you, which means you can’t scale your business beyond the number of hours you’re willing to work. In the absence of a point of differentiation, offering generic services leads consumers to evaluate the people doing the [...]
According to Ross Buhrdorf on today’s Built to Sell Radio episode, “If you get disrupted by Airbnb, that means you must have been the leader.” And he’s right. Buhrdorf was a co-founder and CTO for HomeAway, a pioneer in the online vacation rental industry. While competitor Airbnb made their mark across urban areas, HomeAway focused on luxury [...]
Join merger and acquisition expert Sam Thompson as he presents critical factors you need to know prior to buying or selling a business. How to properly evaluate a company you want to purchase How to prepare to sell your company What can you do to pay a reasonable price for another company or get top dollar [...]
Connie Fenyo started out as an employee at Dye & Durham, a company that makes software for lawyers. She rose to Executive Vice President when she learned her boss was looking to sell the 200-employee firm. Fenyo decided to make a bid. She scraped together all the money she could find, borrowed (in return for a [...]
There is a common characteristic I find among business owners: They have a tendency to ease up as they enter the selling process. They see the goal line and put their business on autopilot. This often happens after there has been a successful meeting with a potential buyer and the Letter of Intent (LOI) has been [...]
Drew Kraemer founded Marketplace Strategy in 2016 and decided that they were going to be good at exactly one thing: helping businesses develop and implement marketing strategies for their Amazon e-commerce stores. As a brand new company, it might sound risky for Kraemer to focus so specifically. His approach meant turning down perfectly good work in [...]
