Most Americans continue to read, hear and see troubling news about the U.S. economic outlook.  Business owners need some reassurance that the sky is not falling, particularly for business owners considering the future sale of their business.  Today is a seller’s market!  But, cyclical indicators point that this window will not stay open forever.

Over at BNET, they are developing a series on the topic of M&A with goal of empowering business sellers and buyers to “Be a Master M&A Negotiator”.  We like BNET because they take complex issues and spell them out in layman’s terms making it easy for most to understand and learn.  The portal with various resources is here. 

The Internet has revolutionized the way we operate in life, work, and recreation.  Small companies can efficiently serve national or global customers real-time, meeting their needs and fulfilling their demands.  While this convenience is mostly positive in the eyes of a business owner, it can also come with some hefty negatives.  Case in point, online reputation.  A trend called “online reputation monitoring”, which began to get noticed back in 2005 is gaining steam as companies seek to manage their brand’s integrity and reputation amongst the thralls of blogs, message boards, forums and what’s known as “user generated content”.  So this begs to question, what is your reputation worth when you are planning on appraising and then selling your business?

If you have ever owned a business at any point in your career, you have most certainly asked the question, “what is my business worth?”.  Well, did you get an answer?  If so, was it legit or pie in the sky?  Did you make a guesstimate or did you CPA give a number?