Author: stevewoda Page 4 of 13

Has the difficult economy of the last few years forced you to re-think your plans for selling your business?  Probably. 

Should you wait for a full-blown economic recovery before seriously considering selling your business?  Not necessarily. 

Is there a mechanism that can help bridge the gap between the purchase price you were hoping to receive for your business and the lower purchase price you are likely to receive?  Absolutely!

An earnout can help you bridge the gap between a buyer's concerns about your business and asking price, on the one hand, and your own certainty about the future performance of your business, on the other.

So, how does it work?  An earnout is a contractual obligation that provides a seller with a higher purchase price – over a designated time period after the closing – provided the seller achieves certain agreed upon targets.  In other words, an earnout can enable you to achieve a higher price on the sale of your business because the final purchase price is based, to an extent agreed by the parties, on the future performance of your business.  Properly designed, an earnout will cause a buyer to pay a higher purchase price at a level the buyer is comfortable paying and at performance levels the seller believes are reasonably attainable.

via vcexperts.com

Angel investors can provide you not only with the money to take your small business to the next level, but also real-world experience, advice and a cache of industry connections. But are you giving investors the information they need to continue the conversation and open their wallets?

Since your first impression is crucial when approaching investors, here's a look at some of the must-haves for pitching your business:

via www.entrepreneur.com

New research led by Elaine Wong at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has found that CEOs with wider faces tend to lead their companies to better financial performance than CEOs whose faces are skinnier. Can this be true? And if so, why?

The researchers say that broader faces, in men, are a result of more testosterone, and note that male hockey players with broader faces have been shown to spend more time in the penalty box for fighting, which is again supposedly linked to testosterone. So, they wondered, would CEOs with higher levels of testosterone-as shown by their facial features-be more aggressive, and would their companies benefit?

via www.bnet.com

One of the best ways for a small business to get on the map is to have the CEO and/or other key members of the executive team establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry. A perfect example of this is the fact that you are reading this story on Small Business Trends. The small business experts who contribute to this site are hoping that their insights will pique your interest and encourage you to find out more about them and their businesses.

Thought leaders have myriad online avenues in which to broadcast their expertise and, hopefully, use those broadcasts to generate business. With the advent of social media, small business owners and experts now use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube (among other social media platforms) to get the word out.

Recently, Google introduced Google+, the search engine giant’s entry into the world of social media. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Google+ has a cornucopia of features and has been catching on like wildfire.

via smallbiztrends.com

Here is what Carol Bartz thinks of the Yahoo (YHOO) board that fired her: "These people f—ed me over," she says, in her first interview since her dismissal from the CEO role late Tuesday.

Last evening, barely 24 hours after Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock called Bartz on her cell phone to tell her the news, she called from her Silicon Valley home ("There are reporters at the gate… a lot of them.") to tell Fortune, exclusively, how the ax came down.

On Tuesday, Bartz was in New York, to speak at Citigroup's (C) technology conference the next day, when she was supposed to call Bostock at 6 p.m. "I called him at 6:06," she recalls. When he got on the line, she says, he started reading a lawyer's prepared statement to dismiss her.

"I said, 'Roy, I think that's a script,'" adding, "'Why don't you have the balls to tell me yourself?'"

When Bostock finished reading, Bartz didn't argue—"I got it. I got it," she told the Yahoo chairman. "I thought you were classier," she added.

via postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com

• Secret Service paid hacker $75k a year, friend says – CNN.com
  Convicted TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez earned $75,000 a year working undercover for the U.S. Secret Service, informing on bank card thieves before he was arrested in 2008 for running his own multimillion-dollar card-hacking operation.
  That information is according to one of Gonzalez’s best friends and convicted accomplices, Stephen Watt.
  Watt pleaded guilty last year to creating a sniffer program that Gonzalez used to siphon millions of credit and debit card numbers from the TJX corporate network while he was working undercover for the government.
  Watt told Threat Level that Gonzalez was paid in cash, which is generally done to protect someone’s status as a confidential informant.
  The Secret Service said it would not comment on payments made to informants. Gonzalez’s attorney did not respond to a call for comment.
  “It’s a significant amount of money to pay an informant but it’s not an outrageous amount to pay if the guy was working full time and delivering good results,”
  (tags: security)
• Inside a global cybercrime ring | Reuters
  Hundreds of computer geeks, most of them students putting themselves through college, crammed into three floors of an office building in an industrial section of Ukraine’s capital Kiev, churning out code at a frenzied pace. They were creating some of the world’s most pernicious, and profitable, computer viruses.
  (tags: security)

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• Finally, Here’s What YouTube’s Investors Made In Sale To Google – WSJ
  We always knew that Sequoia Capital and other shareholders of YouTube made out like bandits when Google bought the video site for $1.65 billion in stock in November 2006. But we had always estimated their profits from the deal – until today, thanks to a newly unsealed court document in Viacom’s longstanding copyright infringement suit against Google and YouTube.
  According to this filing from Viacom’s lawsuit, which alleges that YouTube had knowledge of copyright infringement, Sequoia Capital received $516 million worth of Google stock on Nov. 16, 2006, representing 31% of the total price. (We estimated $495 million and a 30% stake at the time of the sale). Sequoia invested $9 million in the company in late 2005 and early 2006 (not $11.5 million as previously reported), meaning the firm made about 57 times its investment at the time of the sale.
  (tags: youtube google)

• U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time
  (tags: national debt clock visualization)
• Health-reform vote deserves a reasonable process – washingtonpost.com
  We understand the administration's sense of urgency on health-care reform. But what is intended as a final sprint threatens to turn into something unseemly and, more important, contrary to Democrats' promises of transparency and time for deliberation.
  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Monday that she is leaning toward a parliamentary maneuver under which the House would vote on a package of changes to the Senate-approved reform bill, and the underlying Senate bill would then be "deemed" to have passed, even though the House had never voted on it. That may help some House members dodge a politically difficult decision, but it strikes us as a dodgy way to reform the health-care system. Democrats who vote for the package will be tagged with supporting the Senate bill in any event. Why not be straightforward about it?
  (tags: politics healthcare)
• Android Rivals iPhone in Smartphone Loyalty – eMarketer
  As more handsets have been rolled out running Google’s Android operation system, mobile users have become more familiar with the platform and more likely to consider purchasing an Android-based smartphone.
  Further data from Crowd Science confirms the trend: 66% of smartphone users are aware of Android, up 6 points since the introduction of the Nexus One handset in January.
  What’s more, current Android users are nearly as loyal to the operating system as iPhone owners are to theirs. iPhone owners were more likely to say their next purchase would be an Android phone than vice versa.
  (tags: google android smartphone mobile)

• Pre-orders brisk for Apple's new iPad – washingtonpost.com
  Neither recession nor gadget overload shall slow the mania surrounding the introduction of Apple's iPad mobile computer.
  On Friday, the first day that buyers could pre-order the device (it arrives in stores next month), Apple racked up an estimated 91,000 sales in just the first six hours of availability, putting temporarily to rest the Internet's persistent "iPad fail" meme. Analysts predict the first-year sales could reach 5 million.
  (tags: apple ipad)
• FCC releases Internet speed test tool – washingtonpost.com
  The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Thursday launched a broadband test service to help consumers clock the speed of their Internet.
  Located at the site www.broadband.gov, the test is aimed at allowing consumers to compare their actual speeds with the speeds advertised by their providers.
  The FCC release follows an FCC meeting in September where officials said that actual speeds were estimated to lag by as much as 50 percent during busy hours.
  (tags: fcc broadband test)