I’ve sold three businesses in the last 3 years. If you’re looking to sell yours, then I’m sure you’ll want to get a good price for it.
The secret of getting the best price for your business is really simple: make sure you have more than one person interested. Each buyer will be more likely to offer what they think is reasonable rather than what they think they can get away with.
Simply talking to your potential customers is a hugely important way to understand your market better. Jason Cohen of the A Smart Bear blog had a great guest post by an entrepreneur called Robert Graham about this a couple of months ago.
Robert talks about his disappointing experiences with AdWords and how he ultimately developed a great way to call potential customers and present them a win-win offer:
“Hi, I’m Robert and I run a blog focused on deer management. I am looking for a few people to visit, tour your facilities, and talk with you about your business. I can then write up the experience and link you up on the blog.”
Robert found the subsequent visits and interviews to be a fantastic way to find out about his market and develop valuable connections.
I love this advice!
Cold-calling is scary at the best of times. But knowing that you’re calling to offer your potential customer something of value should make it easier to pick up that phone and dial.
You already have a Facebook fan page for your business, right? But does it have a nice, friendly URL that will give people extra confidence in your brand? If not, that’s easy to change. The only requirement: you’ll need to have at least 25 fans.
To change your Facebook fan page URL, just go to this page to set a username for your Facebook page. The ‘username’ is what appears at the end of the URL for your page, e.g. facebook.com/cocacola
Watch out: be careful when you’re setting the username as you won’t be able to change it later.
Like I say, you will need a minimum of 25 fans to do this. As long as you have those, it should only take a minute to set your new, customised URL.
Have you ever wanted to get your team to achieve more in less time? A bit of extra urgency could be the answer. There’s one simple way you can inject this urgency and get your team performing better than ever before: it’s something we’ll call the Daily Priority Board.
This idea comes from Ricardo Poupada during his interview on Mixergy (if you don’t know Andrew Warner’s Mixergy, check it out now — it’s a great resource, especially if you’re building an online business). I’m not sure what Ricardo would have called the idea, so the Daily Priority Board will do for now.
The idea of the Daily Priority Board is really straightforward: schedule a meeting of your top management team for first thing every morning. At each meeting, agree the one or two high-impact things that you and each manager is going to do that day and write them on the board alongside your names.
There will always be one or two things that have the biggest potential benefit in each area of your business. The Daily Priority Board gets you all to focus aggressively on those things.
The next day, review whether the previous day’s priority tasks have been accomplished and, if they haven’t, discuss why. The idea is that these daily reviews help maintain a motivating sense of urgency and are a chance for everyone to share their achievements with the team.
Why not schedule your first Daily Priority Board meeting now and try this idea in your business?