Archive for category: Must Knows About Business Sales

As we embark on a new year, there’s more at stake than just holiday celebrations and wrapping up projects. For business owners with an eye on the future, it’s the best time to dive into your year-end numbers — which can hold the key to unlocking a successful sale in 2026. That’s right: you need to start looking ahead to potential future sales now.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Review

Understanding your KPIs is a fundamental aspect of effective business management. In sum, if you don’t know what’s going on inside your business, you can never expect to sell it. KPIs can offer insight into your business’ health, performance, and potential for growth.

As you wrap up 2023, go beyond just knowing your total revenue and analyze the trends within the sales growth compared to previous years. Is there a particular product or service that stood out? Understanding these nuances can help you replicate success and identify areas for improvement.

Strategically position yourself for the future and study your:

• Financial health: Your profit margins will reveal the efficiency of your operations. Take a closer look at your operating expenses — are there areas where you can trim without compromising quality? Your cash flow also deserves a thorough examination. Consider how a healthy cash flow not only sustains daily operations but also positions you for strategic investments.

• Customer acquisition and retention: Your customers’ experiences are invaluable. Go further than the acquisition metrics — what channels brought in the most engaged people? Use customer satisfaction feedback as a compass for improvements. Happy clients not only contribute to your bottom line but can become loyal advocates who may influence potential buyers when the time comes to sell.

• Market trends and analysis: No matter what industry you’re in, chances are it has changed and will change. Delve deeper into industry-specific trends — what are the disruptive forces at play? Understanding these shifts is essential to moving through what can feel like uncharted waters. Conducting a meticulous analysis of your competition is more than just benchmarking. It will help you identify differentiators that make your business an attractive prospect to buyers.

Strategic Planning for 2024-2026

As you set your goals for the upcoming years, take a hard look at the narrative that your financial forecasts tell. Think about your budget not just as a set of numbers, but as a strategic tool. What investments align with your long-term goals? Create marketing and sales strategies that resonate not only with your current customer base, but also with potential buyers who want to acquire a business with a clear roadmap.

Consider these strategies in particular:

• Operational efficiency: Streamlining your processes will inevitably optimize your business’s efficiency. Dig into the details so that you can identify and eliminate inefficiencies. Consider how adopting technology can enhance not only the speed but also the quality of your operations. Operational efficiency isn’t just a cost-saving measure — it’s an investment in future scalability.

• Team development: Your employees are the backbone of your business. Invest in training programs that not only align with current needs but also anticipate the skills needed for the evolving landscape. A skilled and motivated team is a testament to your commitment to excellence, a quality that will resonate with potential buyers.

• Risk management: All businesses require a bit of risk mitigation. Identifying potential risks is the first step, but developing strategies is where resilience is formed. Can your business adapt to sudden shifts? Stay on top of regulatory changes, not just to comply but to leverage emerging opportunities. Internal risks are often the most challenging. Address them head-on with strong contingency plans and a diversified approach to your revenue streams.

As you bid farewell to 2023, remember that your year-end numbers are a lot more than just figures on a spreadsheet — they’re the keys to unlocking your business’s future success. When you analyze, understand, and act on your year-end numbers you not only prepare yourself for the upcoming year, but you also set the stage for a strategic sale in 2026.

Do you need help understanding your year-end numbers so you can prepare your business for a future sale? That’s where we come in. Give us a call today.

One of the lessons that we learned from March 2020 was that far too many businesses were running without a cash flow safety net. They had made financial calculations (and taken financial payouts) that implied that things would pretty much only ever stay the same or get better. But as we were brutally reminded, that’s not living in reality. What is living in reality is making sure your business has what it needs to survive big downturns that have nothing to do with you and your business.

Credit and Insurance

Dig your well before you’re thirsty. Get a credit line with your bank and fill out all the paperwork they need so you have something to call on if you need. There’s no reason for a business that has been around at least a couple years and has clean financials to not have a line of credit with at least one bank.

You should also see if there are business interruption insurance policies that make sense for your business based on what you experienced during the pandemic.

Forecast

We’ve talked about the importance of red-teaming your business before. In this use case, you’d want to create the absolute worst-case scenarios for your business so you could figure out what you’d have to do in order to survive. Come up with dramatically bad numbers to find out just what kind of beating your business can take. 

Not only is this a lot easier to do before a crisis, it also means you can create an “if this, then that” plan that corresponds to various levels of disaster.

Clean Books

Speaking of clean books, you can’t have a cash flow safety net for your business if you’re using it as a piggy bank for your personal life. One of the first things you want to do in a crisis is trim unnecessary or unneeded costs and it’s a lot simpler to do that before there’s a disaster.

Live Below Your Means

Living below your means isn’t just a good personal rule, it’s a solid business strategy as well. In their earliest days, inexperienced business owners often used “checkbook accounting” to measure the health of their business: money in the account is good, no money is bad. 

Hopefully as the business grew, business owners tapped their accountants to find ways to not only optimize tax strategy, but also to make sure that there are options available should a sudden and unexpected drop in business occur.

Those options could be anything from the business having a reserve of cash to identifying assets that could be sold quickly if needed. There are lots of ways to find cash and savings when you’re not under pressure.

Have New Products and Services in Development

Now obviously, adding new revenue lines is a part of normal business operations, but we saw so many businesses pivot to related and unrelated offerings when their regular business was impeded during lockdowns.

If you are working on new products or services, there’s no reason to wait until a disaster to launch them, but if you have a few ideas at least roughly sketched out that you don’t have the resources to pursue or develop right now, it makes sense to have them in a file that you can go back to and keep adding to over time so that if there is a crisis and you need to manufacture some new revenue, you can look back at some ideas that made sense when there wasn’t a crisis.

Do you want us to take a look at your cash flow safety net and offer suggestions and advice? We’d love to hear from you.

One of our watchwords around the office is “have a plan.” The thing is, there are so many items that live in the world of business transactions that a business owner could be forgiven for saying, “What the heck is that?” when we tell them about something. One of those items (that gets that reaction) is depreciation recapture.

Definition

If you have a sinking feeling as you’re considering the self-explanatory term, you’re not alone. But bear with us as we spell it out: depreciation recapture is the monetary gain from the sale of an asset at the ordinary income tax rate. 

This could be less than you think, because, after all, we are usually talking about a used asset here. But in other circumstances, as with collectibles or real estate, we’re often talking about appreciation, and all that profitable gain beyond what was written off in depreciation is taxed at the capital gains rate.

Depreciation

To clarify for those who aren’t entirely clear on depreciation, it’s the wear and tear and operating expenses of a capital asset necessary for your business. It can be something as simple as a printer or as complex as a CNC machine.

There isn’t one way to calculate depreciation, though the one most are familiar with is the no-mystery-there “straight-line depreciation,” in which you take the difference between the original cost of the item and the value at the end of its usable life and divide that by the number of years the item will be in service.

An alternative to this is declining balance depreciation, which uses much larger amounts of depreciation early on in the item’s usable life. This is often used for tech purchases which can sometimes be capital-intensive.

Why

We don’t make the rules, but if you follow the logic, it’s a way for the IRS to recoup a portion of taxable revenue it didn’t receive because of a depreciation declaration against gross revenues.

Is It Avoidable?

Yes, but only for real estate, and only using the well-known 1031 exchange.

“But what if I don’t use depreciation?” We love that line of thinking, but someone must have tried that already because the tax code says that this applies to the depreciation that “was allowed or allowable.” So even if you don’t take it you’re going to be treated as if you did.

How Will This Affect My Transaction?

One of the first lessons new workers learn in the job market is that the amount of their salary isn’t what they get to keep. Business owners can be the exact same way when they talk about valuations and what they want out of a sale. The government is always going to get its take as well. And there’s even more at stake in regards to how all this is calculated, using terms like cost basis and adjusted cost basis and inputs like gross annual income of the business itself. That’s where the accounting part of your dream team comes in to help you calculate what your tax burden will be in relation to these assets and what kind of bite that takes out of your expected take-home from the sale.

Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know about depreciation recapture! There’s all sorts of stuff you might not know about business transactions. That’s where we can help. Give us a call.

Deal fatigue is exactly what it sounds like: negative feelings around a transaction that, in the worst case, can lead to the deal blowing up or not happening. While deal fatigue isn’t always preventable, it is easily treated. We’ve included a few warning signs and corresponding treatments in this article to help you deal with a case of deal fatigue.

Causes of Deal Fatigue

Deal fatigue is most often caused by time delays:

• Communication is poor or inconsistent: parties and counterparties do not have a consistent rhythm or tempo in responding to queries
• Deal points get renegotiated: some parties use the preparation of final legal documents as a time to renegotiate terms of the deal
• No support staff: neither buyer nor seller have access to a subject matter expert to help them through a particular aspect of the transaction
• Complex deal structure causes a “hurry up and wait” effect

These challenges lead to buyers and sellers feeling frustrated, hopeless, and at times, angry.

Solutions for Deal Fatigue

Remember when you are feeling frustrated to take a moment and remind yourself why you are going through this transaction in the first place. Whether you’re a buyer or a seller, whether this is your first transaction or one of many, it helps to remember that very rarely do business sales go off without any hitches whatsoever. 

If you’re still feeling frustrated, call your broker. We’re here to be that sounding board and to hear all your frustrations. But when you’ve finished venting, we’re going to focus on solutions.

• To combat poor communication, set up regular updates to let everyone know what the status of the current work is and what upcoming milestones there are. Be responsive when it’s your turn to deal with a task or query.
• To avoid misunderstandings in communication, don’t overly rely on email. Remember that some things are better said by telephone or video call or in person and a lot more can get accomplished during those types of meetings. Email has its uses, but speed is not one of its virtues when working on a challenging part of the deal.
• To be better prepared for anything that might come up, have your due diligence paperwork ready (if you’re a seller) and have your dream team (accountant, lawyer, tax advisor) ready (if you’re a buyer) to evaluate paperwork and give advice.
• To stave off renegotiation attempts, remind the counterparty of the LOI. That was the time for negotiation. Unless diligence has revealed something substantially at odds with the assumptions in the LOI, there shouldn’t be extra time spent at the end of the deal renegotiating what was agreed at the beginning of it.

One of the ways we as brokers prepare our clients at the start of the process is by reminding them that this isn’t our first rodeo and that we’ve had to deal with deal fatigue ourselves at times. But as long as you follow a process set around reasonable expectations with parties acting in good faith, you can get to the finish line, even with a bit of deal fatigue. If you don’t deal with deal fatigue when you spot it, the likeliest outcome is the deal dying before closing.

Want to prepare for a transaction with minimum deal fatigue? The Apex team is here to help. Reach out today.

Interest rates, buyer confidence, inflation…these are statistics that don’t care about a new year. They will continue whichever way they want whether a ball drops in New York at midnight or not.. But humans do see a lot of significance in a new year, and that invisible line between December 31st and January 1st can be an accelerant for a seller to get a deal closed or a final push for a buyer to finally get serious about buying a business in a new year.

Interest Rates

Interest rates are on a trend line up, which means that the cost of operating a business is going up. So, unless sales are up and margins are staying the same, profitability will be down which means valuations will be down…unless proper steps are taken.

Remedies: work with your bank on strategies to deal with interest rates, whether it be on your line of credit or even a loan you might have.

Buyer Confidence

Before the rain comes you can often smell it or sense it. Market forecasters don’t entirely agree about what is going to happen or when it’s going to happen. That uncertainty translates into “feels like rain” so that is leading to a dip in buyer confidence.

Remedies: Sellers need to continue to stress their fundamentals and brag about their performance in 2020 or 2021, if there’s braggable material there. Unless buyers think whatever is coming next will be worse than extreme Covid lockdowns, they may be able to see through their feelings to the hard, cold numbers.

Inflation

Prices are going up in almost every sector. That means if you haven’t raised prices, you are likely making less money, because your costs have gone up. Some businesses have held the line on pricing in part not to shock customers, in part not to lose market share. But two years on with inflation continuing on, those businesses are seriously considering a price change.

Remedies: raise prices. Raising your prices periodically is a healthy business practice anyway, but even more so when inflation is not a secret. You can also find creative ways to offer customers more perceived value, whether that might be offering a discount on a larger advance purchase than they are used to or asking them to renew a contract for a longer period before you raise prices. Remember that keeping a solid profit margin isn’t just about your business surviving and thriving in the short-term, it’s about a narrative of value in the medium and long-term, particularly if you want to sell.

Seller Fatigue

When we look back at this period in years to come, we might lead the narrative in this way, “And then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.” We saw in the last two years that some business owners were already contemplating a sale, but Covid made them tap out sooner. As the issues we mentioned above continue on, many are looking at 2023 with the thought that they don’t want to be in this same position this time next year.

Remedies: explore selling. It’s okay to admit that you’re tired and want to give up. Nobody is supposed to run a business forever. That doesn’t mean we’re going to be able to list and sell your business before the new year (though stranger things have happened) but you should talk to us now so that we have a plan for the new year. When everyone comes back from the holidays you will be ready to go with your listing and be energized that an exit plan is in place.

Pondering other trends we didn’t mention here? We’d love to talk to you about them. Give us a call.