The first step toward being a successful leader of your own company is to think like a CEO in the first place. If you don’t cultivate the “right” thoughts, you’re defeated before you start. You need to eventually build a vision of where you are headed and how you will get there, but without the mental wherewithal to navigate the waters, it’s just a

Once you have decided the industry type, consider referring to Business Brokerage Press’ Business Reference Guide.46 This is a wonderful reference for determining trends, valuations, margins, expense breakdowns, other benchmark data, and expert comments.

Getting a tour of the business can tell you multitudes about the culture and flavor. Cleanliness, orderliness, focused or unfocused employees, new or outdated assets.

Another great help is to ask for income statements on a cash basis versus an accrual basis for high-growth companies. This will give you insight into the variance in demand for inventory or costs of goods sold per month—a very helpful characteristic to analyze

These funds can also assist in helping you acquire significantly larger companies than you could do on your own, effectively allowing you to stretch well into the middle market (which I’ll define here, as those companies generating between $5 and $100 million in revenue4) or provide additional capital to lower the debt profile.

As a result, I have found that the most “affordable” acquisitions for financial buyers and acquisition entrepreneurs can be had in the $250,000 to $700,000 SDE range.

The very first thing he does when considering a new acquisition is go out to lunch with the seller. If

VC investor and author Guy Kawasaki wrote a blog post titled, “The Only 10 Slides You Need in a Pitch,” echoing the philosophies from his book, The Art of the Start. The deck is intended for startup companies to address only the biggest questions and get to the meat of each issue quickly. Every time I am developing a startup idea or acquisition I

The service industry employs more than 33 percent of the world’s labor force. It includes all professional services like legal and accounting, banking, advertising, software engineering, IT, medicine, nonprofit activity, education, and retail or custom light manufacturing.