Go Beyond What The World Expects

This blog is dedicated to the exploration, discussion and teaching of leadership, management, and business concepts that enable the owners of small and midsize businesses to craft and execute a three-pronged Exit Plan that focuses on increasing the market value of their business, personal financial planning, and planning for life after business ownership. Here we explore the ways that owners can identify, protect, grow, harvest, and ultimately manage the value of their business through application of the Value Acceleration Methodology. 

Better vs More

Business owners apply two different approaches to business development and capture:  they either invest their energies into attracting customers or they expend their efforts chasing opportunities.  One approach is strategic, the other is mostly tactical. The first way stems from a desire to do business better, to continually move the company toward best-in-class, and to develop a culture of doing the right things, at the right time, for the right reasons.  Customers become attracted by this approach because of the quality and reliability it produces. The second way springs from a hunger for more:  more revenue, higher profits, and larger market share.  The first is a long-term approach that builds value into the business, the second is a short-term mindset that focuses on current income.  If you focus on Better, more will eventually come.  If you focus on More, you may enjoy short-term success, but ultimately the business will be indistinguishable from the crowd and it likely will be unsaleable at the end.

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The Right People

A team staffed by the right people is critical to your business success – second only to your ability to lead.  Building the right team is more important than selecting which customers to serve or determining which products and services the company will sell.  It is more important than vision, strategy, organizational structure, or technology. In Good to Great, Jim Collins summarized the thinking on this topic of those executives who took their businesses from being merely good to being great: “If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.”

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Is Your Business Stuck?

Any business can become stuck, by which I mean growth has stalled and the activities that used to produce satisfactory results are no longer working. It’s easy to do. Revenue stalls, profits become flat, customers drift away. Sometimes things breakdown internally. Get back to basics with Six Weeks to Better Business.

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No Man’s Land

The unprotected space outside of the small business programs is what I call No Man’s Land, where unprepared companies get crushed by giants. Make sure you get back to basics. Figure out that one main thing you can be best-in-class at doing, and redesign your business around that. Take a develop a culture of discipline and relentless execution, and keep pushing toward your preferred future. A good management consultant can help you develop a strategy and an action plan to get you on the path to success. I suggest reading Good to Great and Great by Choice by Jim Collins and Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Maugorgne.

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Unlocking the Value Trapped in Your Business

80% of companies with less than $50M in annual sales never sell. Certified Exit Planning Advisors (CEPA) are trained and credentialed to maximize the value of your business while ensuring that all personal, financial, tax, and legal issues have been addressed. Be proactive about building the value of your business so that, whenever and however you transition from ownership, you and your family will be able to benefit from the wealth that you have created through your years of hard work and sacrifice.

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Elite Business Advisors Earn Prestigious CEPA Designation

The Exit Planning Institute (EPI) is proud to announce that Tom Fish recently earned the Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA) designation after completing the Institute’s intensive CEPA four-day executive MBA-style program in Atlanta, Georgia. Tom joins an elite group of business advisors who have received this designation and are a part of the Exit Planning Institute’s international community of CEPAs. The CEPA program is the most widely accepted and endorsed program in the world.

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Start the New Year Right

Many people consider planning a waste of time. Business plans takes a lot of time and energy to produce a document that sits in a binder on a shelf without being looked at for 12 months or longer. I respectfully disagree. The act of planning forces you to intentionally think about your business in a critical and systematic way. Most of us aren’t lucky or gifted enough to pull off an ad hoc approach to making important business decisions about our target customers, the competition, and the actions we must take to be successful. Here are 8 steps for getting your business headed in the right direction for 2017.

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A Leadership Lesson Every Plebe Learns By Heart

“The discipline which makes the soldiers of a free country reliable in battle is not to be gained by harsh or tyrannical treatment.” I have learned that Love (unselfish service to others) and Respect (treating people with the dignity owed to them just for being human beings) is the only truly reliable way to create trust and build a culture for long term success.

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What is Upside Down Leadership?

Upside Down Leadership is another way of saying servant leadership. Management guru Kenneth Blanchard in his book Leadership and the One Minute Manager pointed toward this kind of leadership by having the One Minute Manager state: “When you think in a pyramid… the...

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You Started A Business – Now What?

Why do so many businesses fail in the first two years? Why do so many firms make it through the “survival” stage only to stall around the fourth or fifth year? One of the biggest reasons is they start with too little cash. As the old saying goes: it takes...

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Be Present

In the Go Beyond school of Upside Down Leadership we teach six things that a leader must BE: a person of character, authentic, vulnerable, accepting, present and useful. The topic for today is being present. I recently suggested to the CEO of a rapidly growing company...

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Let Them See You Walk Through Fire

Have you ever heard the saying, “Never let them see you sweat?” That slogan became part of American culture in 1984 through a TV commercial for an antiperspirant. It quickly entered the public lexicon, invoking images of a supremely confident professional,...

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Love and Respect

Leadership is a relationship between the people of an organization and their leader. Higher level leadership is a dynamic feedback loop fueled by love and respect, the foundation of all good relationships. Love in this sense is not soft sentimentalism, romantic...

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