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How to Find Your Weakest Link.. An Interview with Louis Croiser
I recently conducted an interview with Louis Crosier. Among other impressive accomplishments, Louis is the author of "Selling Your Business: The Transition from Entrepreneur to Investor."
Specifically, Louis is an expert on helping entrepreneurs realize their financial dreams by selling their businesses and investing their proceeds wisely.
During the interview, Louis made numerous key points regarding things you need to be doing while you are starting, growing, and selling your business, and then what you need to do post-sale.
While you can listen to the interview yourself below, two of my favorite points were as follows:
-1- Your choice of corporate structure (e.g., LLC vs. C-Corp) can potentially save you millions of dollars later on when your company is sold. Fortunately, you can, for the most part, change your corporate structure down the road. But over time, your options become fewer and fewer.
-2- You need to find your weaknesses before it's too late. Specifically, Louis explained that when trying to maximize the price at which your business sells, you need to really think through where the vulnerabilities of your business are.
For example, is your business dependent on a small number of key customers? Are there key employees? What kind of barriers to entry and intellectual property are associated with your business? In other words, where is your business vulnerable to either competitors or major disruptions? You need to identify these vulnerabilities well in advance of a sale, and shore those things up.
Other key questions that Louis answered for me included:
- When deciding to sell your company, who should be on your professional advisory team and when should you start building that team?
- What are the main types of deal structures when selling your business, such as selling for all cash or for all stock? How common are each? Which are the most favorable to the entrepreneur?
- Once you sell your company, how should you re-invest your earnings and what should you be aware of?
- What do entrepreneurs need to know about now, when hoping to sell their businesses in the future?
Click here to download the transcript
Click here to download an MP3 of the interview, or use the player below to stream the audio.
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