40

Exiting Tips From One Of The Top 40 Under 40

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Wind Mobile founder Anthony Lacavera has started 12 businesses, six of which he has exited. His exits have ranged in value from the $6 million he got for one of his recent start-ups to $1.3 billion when he sold Wind Mobile. He did it by following…
sticky bun

Creating Sticky Customers

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Repeat customers are the lifeblood of your business, but customers can be fickle. Here's how to make them sticky. In a traditional business, the customer buys your product or service once, and it is up to you to try to convince them to buy…
Increase

Will This be the Year You Seriously Drive up the Value of Your Company?

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If you have resolved to make your company more valuable in 2017, you may want to think hard about how your customers pay. If you have a transaction business model where customers pay once for what they buy, expect your company’s value…
gears

Why Startups Stall

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Have you ever wondered why startup companies stop growing? Sometimes they run out of potential customers to sell to or their product starts losing market share to a competitor, but there is often a more fundamental reason: the founder(s) lose…
shark sighting

Why Now Is the Riskiest Time To Own Your Business

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Most people think of starting a business as risky, but unless you invest a significant amount of start-up cash in your venture, you’re not really risking much other than your time. That changes if you’re lucky enough to get your business…
surprise

The Surprising Secret to A Big Exit

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We get to see a lot of company founders who are contemplating an exit. Some of our customers get lucky early in life, but in the vast majority of examples where a founder is getting a seven- or eight-figure offer, it is not their first rodeo.…
Nike

The Downside of Selling Someone Else’s Product

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Are you tempted to re-sell someone else’s product to boost your topline revenue? On the surface, becoming a distributor for a popular product can appear to be a simple way to grow your sales—simply find something that is already proven…
employees

The Downside of Being Upfront with Employees

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One of the core principles of creating a more valuable business is ensuring it can run without you by getting managers to think like owners. The theory goes that empowered employees are the best positioned to solve your company’s thorniest…
Child

The Anatomy of a Successful Exit

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Stephanie Breedlove started Breedlove & Associates in 1992 as a way to pay her nanny. The big payroll processors weren’t interested in dealing with one person’s wages and doing it themselves was complicated and time-consuming, too much…
Peachs

One Way To Decide When To Sell

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How do you know the right time to sell your company? One answer to this age-old question is that the time to sell is when someone else is willing to invest more in your business than you are. When you start a business, nobody is willing…