1. Determine a Realistic Price Range 2. Understand Tax Consequences 3. Prepare for a Sale 4. Seek Potential Buyers 5. Negotiate Your Deal 6. Sign a Sales Agreement 7. Plan for Closing 8. File Paperwork With IRS

Now for GOOD STUFF!

Getting Cash Out of your Business Note Business notes, known more specifically as seller carryback business notes, are created when buyer of a business can not or will not pay all cash. Frequently, banks and similar lending institutions are hesitant to loan money to new business owners who have minimal track records and where hard assets make up a small percentage of total purchase price.

Or… Still Fighting Battles and Losing Wars

The objective is to beat competition and make money. Everything a business organization does should be focused on that simple objective, with interpretation through various Vision and Mission Statements. However if we take a survey of how our organizations spend our energy, often that objective is lost in a web of internal politics and positioning. Of course competition is normally good – regardless of whether it is internal or external – to point we do not lose focus on company objectives as ultimate outcome of our competition.

We often use phrase “winning battles and losing wars.” That phrase really hits home when we record all things we do, every day of our business lives, that result in a situation where we are struggling with more fervor for internal positioning then committing energy in activities to beat our competition. What does “winning battles and losing wars really mean?

Perhaps sales and operations groups are having difficulty with product and contract provisioning. Sales of course wants to sign contracts, get acceptance, and quickly start customer billing – their commission depends on shortening book to bank process. Operations is unhappy because contracts tend to stray from letter of a product or service. Thus, operations may dig their heels in and not expedite provisioning while “bring sales guys into line.”

What is result of this little battle? Of course, customer does not receive service within want date and company does not get paid as quickly as they would with a fast implementation and acceptance. And I, as your competitor, will be aggressively spending my time eroding your market share. The customer is angry, sales and operations people are angry, and your image in industry is tarnished while competition quickly moves to exploit your weaknesses.

Let’s use a different example. Your organization has same challenge every other organization around world has – a need for higher compute power, and a need to lower capital expenses on IT-related equipment. So we look into our bag of tools and determine a few relatively easy innovations could meet both objectives. You determine you can save money and increase compute resource through:

Server consolidation Disk consolidation/virtualization GRID computing Easy, right?

In Platform Computing’s recent study “Organizational Politics as a Barrier to

Implementing Grid Computing” 79% of company managers indicated that resource consolidation and virtualization should be considered high priorities for an organization’s IT planning, however 89% of same companies indicated organizational politics and other issues could pose a major barrier in accomplishing consolidation.