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I sit on the board of directors of the Midwest Business Brokers and Intermediaries (MBBI). An attorney from a small Chicago law firm was recently elected to the board. In his first meeting he introduced himself and said he was on the board at a Chicago attorney association. He stood up in front of our board and said, “You guys don’t have a very good reputation in the legal community.

That certainly got our attention and he went on to explain the reasons why. As I listened to him, it occurred to me that what he was describing was the behaviors of a few of the big national Middle market M&A firms that put on the Business Seller Seminars. Because these firms have so much marketing muscle, they effectively become the face of our profession. No wonder the legal profession does not embrace us.

I walked up to him after the meeting and asked him if I could meet with him and share with him another view of our profession. As our meeting date approached, I was contacted by a business owner who had located me through a Google search (we write a lot of articles) and told me his sad story.

This was a small company that I would describe as being in the pre-profit stage. This owner had received a series of solicitations inviting him to come to a seminar about selling his business. He signed up and was contacted by phone several more times by this company’s representatives to make sure he would attend. They were very specific that he should not bring any company logo items to the seminar for confidentiality reasons.

The presentations were very professionally orchestrated and this firm gave the attendees the impression that the M&A firm possessed this special skill to take these companies and write a powerful “Book” that would dramatically improve their value to the market. They actually used the words, “We will dress up the Pig.” They also said they had a big roster of foreign buyers and that they had an upcoming conference in Brussels where they would be presenting the seminar attendees’ companies to these qualified buyers that were just dying to get their hands on American companies.

In the Seminar’s question and answer period, this business owner asked, “Why am I here?” The presenter jumped all over that one. Everyone of you in this room was specifically selected because your industry is hot with M&A activity. Later in the presentation, one of the seminar presenters took this owner aside and said he would give him a break on the $37,000 up front fees.

They scheduled a follow-up meeting where this Seminar guy pounded on this poor business owner and below is a cut and paste from the email this seller sent me:

“Thanks a lot for the high speed education this morning. The man explained that because of the vast target market for the Product Name Confidential globally, it’s effectiveness and price etc. that Company Name Confidential in the right hands could generate $300,000,000 a year etc. blah blah blah. “It would also give the buyer enhanced stock value. We probably have about 200 qualified buyers right now for you…” He continues, “What you have is an oil well, what the buyer has is a derrick”. He’s from Texas thus, the oil analogy. “One owner no partners with all their attorneys this will be so easy to sell, so clean neat and tidy…”

Finally, “He left very angry because I told him I wasn’t gonna pay them $29,000. So.. I was left to believe that $29,000 was gonna stop his firm from reaping all that “easy money”. That just doesn’t sound real world enough for me. I don’t want to be stuck in their database. I don’t know what he was pissed about… They called me I didn’t call them. I’m not on any “I wanna sell my company” lists. Hell I just got the company phone number listed about two weeks ago. Honest to God I haven’t gotten the first Company Name Confidential phone bill yet.”

Wow. Where do I begin? How about what a sleazy, dishonest, outrageous load of bull.
Luckily this seller had talked to me before his meeting and I warned him about this approach. I had no idea it was quite this misleading. This business owner sent this guy packing and he was ticked off because he didn’t sell a $29,000 book.

As long as I have gone this far, I might as well expose the whole story. This approach works to sign up business owners with stars in their eyes for $37,000 books. What an awesome business. Write a book with industry boilerplate and some minor analysis compiled by some recent grad analysts sitting in a room at HQ that costs the seminar company a maximum of $2500 to produce. Enter these deals into their inventory database and send it out to the Private Equity Groups and present the list to the foreign buyers.

They lock up the seller with a long contract tail and effectively prevent a legitimate firm from actually working the sale process for 2 to 3 years. If the business is in the 2 in 10 that gets immediate interest, then the seminar firm will have a banker work on it. If you are in the unfortunate 8, you become a passive entry in their deal inventory.

Our bankers and the bankers of the 90% of M&A companies that provide a fair value for their services, can only handle effectively four to five simultaneous transactions. If you took this Seminar Company’s deal inventory and divided it by the number of bankers, you would find that they have over 25 live deals per banker. It is impossible to professionally represent these sellers who have paid an up-front fee of $37,000 for this service.

Foreign buyers are not stupid, they do not pay more for companies than American companies, and they are generally not interested in even looking at an acquisition under $25 million in revenue. A “book” never sold a company or made it more valuable. Making changes in your company to improve its performance will make it more valuable. A good M&A advisor or your CPA can provide you important input about that.

What really helps you maximize your company’s selling price is to have an M&A advisor directly contact the universe of most likely strategic buyers and to get several interested in your company. This results in a competition for your company, often called a soft auction. As these strategic buyers view your company as a must have acquisition, the price and terms are significantly improved.

href=”http://www.midmarkcap.com/SellerResources.cfm” target=”_blank”>Dave Kauppi is a Merger and Acquisition Advisor and President of MidMarket Capital, representing owners in the sale of privately held businesses. We provide Wall Street style investment banking services to lower mid market companies at a size appropriate fee structure.

Are you living a life of excellence? Are you everything you aspire to be? Those are the questions life coach and mentor Terri Werner asks her clients, many of whom are chiropractors.

Werner, who has a background in marketing, financial planning and business development, recently spoke to a group of chiropractors at the Karl Parker Seminar in Dallas, Texas. Her message, in the words of one attendee was “tremendous.”

Werner does one-on-one coaching, public speaking and is the author of several books and recordings on building excellence in your life and business practices. Says Werner, “I help a lot of chiropractors market their practice, look at vertical marketing, and how to get their message out, but I do that after we first address the issues in their life.” Her vision is creating a culture of excellence, one life at a time.

When a business or individual engages Werner to assist them, she first looks at what is going on in their lives in general. She asks, “Are they living in excellence? Are they living in integrity? Have they forgiven?” All these things that have to do with the heart and head coming together to create a dynamic excellence in one’s life.

Werner feels that once a person finds what is lacking in their life, and what they could do better, then all things fall into place. “I really believe everything has to do with everything.” She recommends journaling as a way to discover areas where a person is lacking and can improve. Excellence, she says, comes once a person discovers these things and works to change them. “I don’t think excellence has to be difficult. I really define excellence as creating an environment where the propensity to excel is easy.”

Werner knows from experience that anything can be accomplished when you apply these principles. “I had gone through some really tough things in my life and I just decided to implement and do everything I could to create excellence. Doing so meant forgiveness and releasing judgments.”

Werner’s pursuit of excellence paid off in the form of a new book, Train Wreck to Triumph, as well as a partnership with Dr. Denis Waitley and NFL star Tim Brown to create a kid-safe web browser. She is currently working on a new project called A Question of Change. “The premise is that no matter where you are in life whether you’re in trauma or grand success requires focus on getting the right answers. In order to get the right answer, you must ask the right question.” This new book assists readers in asking the right questions to get the outcomes they desire.

Werner has been instrumental in helping many people enrich their lives, grow their businesses and become outcome driven by living lives of excellence.

You can hear Dr. Patrick Porter’s complete interview by going to Listen To The Podcast. Dr. Porter’s chiropractic support program can be viewed at Find Out About The NXTLynk

More often than not, people feel overconfident and treat the approach a bit too casually. However, you should make sure that both the cover letter and the resume are well drafted, so that they make a lasting impression on the reader. They should be planned to stand out in content as well as presentation.

The Importance Of A Good First Impression

The First Impression is usually the Last Impression. In today’s highly competitive world, creating a good first impression is extremely important. This is where the resume plays a very important role in contributing towards success in landing a job. A resume is the most effective tool that can help you win a coveted interview opportunity.

How To Create A Good First Impression

Writing an impressive resume is an important part of your job search preparation. Keep in mind that your resume is indeed a catalog of your abilities. Here are a few steps on how to write a resume that will leave a lasting impression:

- It is very important to create your resume in a professional and appropriate format. There are two basic formats that are used - Functional and Chronological.
- When creating your resume, you can use the free resume forms that are posted on the Internet. However, be careful that your resume doesn’t end up looking like a cookie-cutter template.
- The two most important factors to keep in mind while creating your resume are correct grammar and proper punctuation. Using proper punctuation marks is vital for conveying clear and precise business messages. A resume that contains plenty of grammatical errors creates a bad impression. If you are unable to proofread your own resume, get another professional or a friend to do it for you.
- Make use of industry-oriented words that help you to come across as a highly knowledgeable and professional person.
- Most people think that a comprehensive resume that describes all their past and present achievements is the best way to showcase their skills and expertise. However, this is not true. As a rule, you only need to go back about 5-6 years. Unless you are a recent grad, that job you had in high school is probably irrelevant.

Whether or not you have a professional degree from a coveted institute and are on the lookout for an entry-level position, it is important to market yourself efficiently. Your main aim should be to display your abilities, skill, work experience, educational qualifications, projects, achievements and anything that might work to your advantage.

Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solution’s Six Sigma Online offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

Ebay is a worldwide used online auction site. Sometimes to start to sell on a site like this is quite daunting, so I have put together some EBay selling tips to help you get started and hopefully to help you make some money.

If you are still thinking of ideas of what you could sell to make money, just stop, look around your home and see what you think you don’t need or want anymore. Clothes, books, media, shoes, plates, china, ornaments, paper, pens, picture frames, toys. Look around to see what you think you could sell. If you are not sure if it would sell, search for it and see if anyone else is selling it, if they are then you can too!

EBay selling tips would not be complete with out payment advice. Buyers can pay by various methods, check, postal order or PayPal. By far the easiest way is PayPal so I would highly recommend setting up a PayPal account for this. It is the safest way to buy and sell for both the buyer and the seller.

There are costs involved in eBay and you need to keep track of what you are spending out so that you know what profit you are making, here is a list of the costs involved:

Item cost
Listing and reserve fees
Feature fees
Final Value fee (if the item sells).
Auction Management Service (if you use one).
Credit card or PayPal service fees
Internet service or DSL fees
Shipping costs and materials

Think carefully about the title of your item. If someone is searching for a particular, item you have to think what they may type into search for. For instance “blue jumper” Is a very vague description, but “Perfect condition ladies blue jumper size 12″ would attract a lot more visitors. Also try to include the brand name and people often search for brands.

One of the most important one of the eBay selling tips is to ALWAYS include a picture of what you are selling. Most buyers will not buy an item with no picture. Also, you will almost double the money you make if you list the picture in the gallery view, this is only 15p but many buyers will only look at auctions with a gallery picture. Items with no gallery picture are often deemed invisible.

Books, CDs and DVDs and other media have ISBN or UPC numbers, if you add this into your item description then eBay will put a picture in for you of the cover of the item and also a lot of the other information about the item.

Do some research on the item you are selling, find out the retail value and include that in the information about your item. If the buyer knows the retail value you are more likely to get a better price for it. Look up other eBay auctions selling the same items as you, see how much they are going for and what they sell for, you can gauge interest that way.

You need to find out which category to put your item in, you can do this by eBay’s recommended or you can choose your own. For an extra free you can put it in a sub category also. Make sure you think carefully about the category and search other items similar to yours to see what category they are listed in.

If you are still unsure about how much to list your item for then you can always start it at a low auction price and put a reserve price on it so that it can’t go for under that price. The buyer will not know what the reserve is until they get to it, but for your peace of mind you will know that you will get the price you want. If you start bidding higher you are much less likely to get any bids at all.

Make sure you weigh your item and work out the shipping costs, don’t forget to add the weight for the packaging. You can charge a flat rate for shipping so make sure this is clear in your listing. Make sure you don’t put your postage costs too high as this can scare off potential buyers. If there are two items both going for the same amount, the one with the cheaper postage will be more likely to get more bids.

Shelley Green is the owner of http://www.fast-ways-to-make-money.com, a site that specializes in Fast Ways to Make Mondy including tips, advice and also other recommended sites.

The past several years have been very profitable for many real estate investors. But the market is changing and it may be time for many investors to be on the lookout for a new strategy. For those who own rentals, the trend was to buy a rental property, see it appreciate, and buy another rental property using a 1031 tax-deferred exchange to eliminate current capital gains taxes on the profits.

However, there simply aren’t as many solid investment properties available in today’s real estate market. The sharp increase in real estate prices hasn’t remained in balance with rental income. If you’re thinking about selling your investment properties now, you probably are concerned about the large tax bill you’ll face.

Low net rent income, demanding tenants, and a large amount of equity at risk have caused almost all real estate owners to consider selling their real estate. But there are countless investors who feel they are “stuck” with property right now that they’d rather sell. Many are hesitant to reinvest in a new 1031 exchange property because of low rental rates, but are unwilling to cash out on the property out of fear of paying hefty capital gains taxes. The good news is that for many owners and investors, the Private Annuity Trust offers a way to defer paying capital gains taxes, create a lifetime income and protect your assets as well.

With the Private Annuity Trust, real estate investors have a safe and legal way to exit from the labor of property management, the aggravation of dealing with tenants, and the anxiety of wondering how property values will fare in the current real estate market. With the Trust, there’s no pressure to reinvest right away to avoid paying capital gains. Instead investors can avoid making hasty decisions, feel out the market, and decide whether or not they even want to stay in real estate.

How the Private Annuity Trust defers capital gains taxes
Before the sale of the property is final, the property is transferred into the Private Annuity Trust. When the property is ultimately sold, the Trust can begin providing a lifetime stream of income, with taxes deferred over the seller’s lifetime. The Trust assets are protected from creditors and lawsuits, and the assets in the Trust can eventually pass to the seller’s beneficiaries without worry about the current 46% estate tax rate.

Many investors are concerned that due to significant property appreciation over the last several years, they are now too heavily invested in real estate. They just want to sell some of their assets and place their money into a more diversified, completely protected, lower maintenance investment vehicle with predictable cash flow. At the same time, they don’t want to fork over up to 30% of their investment profits in the form of capital gains tax payments if they don’t find a suitable investment in time.

The current Internal Revenue codes and strategic implementation of Private Annuity Trusts make avoiding this predicament a reality. Payments from the trust don’t need to begin right away-not until age 70

Write about a niche area that you are interested in and create an Ecourse on it. Then start a marketing campaign to build a subscriber list. If the list grows quickly and people opt in to learn more about the niche, you are creating a ready pool of customers to sell to once the actual product is launched. Evidence will show if there is a strong need for the product.

Toward the end of your ad copy, use a “P.S.” to remind your readers some last minute thoughts that will sway their decision in your favour. This is where you either want to repeat a strong benefit or a possible loss should the reader not purchase your product by taking quick action.

Create a free ebook that has valuable content, make it viral by allowing your readers to encode their own links into the ebook and allow them to give it away. This will increase your traffic and brand your internet identity.

Create multiple streams of income with your web site. The products offered should be focused around specific markets. Your own products and affiliate products should tie in with one another. Adding some adsense advertising to your website can also bring in some revenue.

Thank your visitors in your ad copy, for spending time to visit your website. Being respectful to the reader earns their trust, puts them in a good mood, and brands you as someone thoughtful about others. People are more likely to buy from someone they feel is likeable and a pleasure doing business with.

When a customer purchases your product, take them to a “Thank You” page which leads to backend products that compliment the first purchase.

Focus on a few products on your web site instead of selling a large amount of products. Too many choices can overwhelm your visitors and they will feel that you are not catering to their needs. Never introduce Offer A to your customer at the “Opt-In” page, then a different product B at your “Confirm Subscription” page and a different product C at your “Thank You” page. Remember that you have not made the sale yet and need to expose the same product ad to your potential customer multiple times in order to achieve maximum impact and close a sale.

Include content and free stuff on your web site that promote the products you’re selling. If they don’t read your ads, they may read your offerings.

Allow your visitors to identify with you. Use an audio generator, photograph and signature to publish information about yourself. Once people connect with you because of the efforts you put in to reach out to your readers, you will find it easier to close sales.

Provide a support@yourdomain.com email address so that visitors know that they can have support when they need it. Some customers may send you an email to see how quick you respond, so its important to reply within 24 hours. Doing so will leave a good impression, connect you with your online customer and increase the likelihood of a sale. It also adds credibility to your business.

Sherman Choo is an Internet Marketer helping people all over the globe achieve Financial Freedom. To discover the perfect Internet Network Marketing business model that has helped thousands make money online and find out if this Internet Home Business is right for you. Visit==>http://www.success-university.us

When I was a young thing - you were considered to be a poor employee if you were not able to ‘hang on’ to your job for your working life. Now you are considered to be somewhat of a dinosaur if you do!

The fact that you are likely to change your job and even the type of business you are in, three to eight times in your working life, means that you should consider this when undertaking your initial training for a career.

This does not mean that you should not train for and begin in an area of your first choice - but it does mean that you need a mind set that will enable you to change direction mid stride and that you are prepared to continue training throughout your life.

However there is another problem that is engulfing many of us these days and that is that the type of jobs we want (especially at the dollar level we are used to) just may not be available. This is one of the reasons for the mass exodus from being an employee to being an entrepreneur and running your own business.

Currently over 67% of all small business in Australia is run from home. And why is that? In many cases it is because people are trialling a business idea they have and want to see if it would be successful before taking it to the next level. When they are sure that their business idea will work, something they might not have expected occurs. They find they actually like working from home. They can be with their loved ones and enjoy the flexibility of time allocation; they also reduce travel time and continue reduced overheads, by staying at home.

This phenomenon opens up another door of opportunity for many ‘would be’ business operators. This new age entrepreneur needs further training in the area of business and they want it quickly and at a time that suits them. Consequently formal classroom training over a number of weeks (or years) is not for them. So where do we find the trainers for this emerging sector?

There are a number of careers that would have the skills set to enable training to take place e.g. teachers, nurses, sociologists, counsellors etc. So this group could change career path and train the start up businesses - but even though they have the skills to do the training they also need knowledge in the small and micro business sector.

What often happens is those with good training skills have no real knowledge (only theory - when this new group want practical support and advice) and those with some knowledge do not have the training skills e.g. local government employees making a change.

Consequently there is a massive growth in Business and Lifestyle Coaching where the coach may be formally trained or just decide to call themselves a coach! It is because of this diversity of skill sets of existing coaches and the great disparity of costs they charge, that makes the micro and home based business operators sceptical and very wary.

So, what is the solution? It would seem logical that those with training skills (even trained coaches) need to access content that is relevant, cost effective and above all, contains vital, practical information for them to provide to the start up business operator.

There are experts in the field of micro and home based businesses who have designed presentations for this sector that fulfil all the essential requirements mentioned above. The good news is that some of these experts are prepared to license their value packed information sessions so that you, the trainers, can ensure that you have the essential information required. Coaches can also add to their portfolio by licensing some of the Presentations.

So if you are looking for a career change - consider becoming a trainer and help the thousands who are also changing direction and need speedy, relevant and practical support.

Barbara Gabogrecan is a renowned artist and author, winning many awards. You can see an example using the techniques discussed above, at:- http://www.mbnsolutions.com.au/index.php?module=Website&action=Text&content=1133081509671-8917