The process of preparing your company for sale is called "exit strategy planning." We recently formalized our exit strategy planning consulting service. Shutterfly Inc. NASDAQ:SFLY) recently agreed to pay $333 million in cash and stock to acquire Tiny Prints Inc., Interestingly, I'm a Tiny Prints customer. MORE >>

An extraordinarily valuable lesson for both entrepreneurs and investors is that when you sell a business a well designed and executed exit strategy can easily increase the business valuation by 50%, and sometimes by 100%. My First Business Sale – Nexus Engineering. didn’t ‘get it’ until I was fifty. MORE >>

Even if an unsolicited offer does come in, boards should almost never approve a company sale when there is only one bidder because the price will almost certainly be too low. Successful company sales almost always involve a competitive bidding process. Predictability. Negotiating strength. Price maximization. Effective governance. MORE >>

This is the first in a series of articles on how to design and execute an optimum exit for your company. Future installments will discuss: how exit strategy drives financing strategy, corporate DNA, who the buyers are, secondary sales, building an exit plan, the exit timeline and ways to maximize your exit value. MORE >>

The market for selling a business is very ‘inefficient’ This is one of the reasons a well designed and executed exit can easily increase the value of a business by 50% or more. If you own shares in a NASDAQ listed stock you can post them for sale at the market price and you will usually have a buyer within a few minutes. MORE >>