Practical advice for the new CEO
If you ever want to sell your business, you need a plan. Depending on the size of your business, proper strategic exit planning can take anywhere from 1 to 7 years to do right.
And, when you've maximized the value of your business and are ready to sell it, according to the US Small Business Administration, it can take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years to sell.
In this podcast, we tap the expertise of an exit planning expert: our friend, entrepreneur and author John Warrillow. Having built and sold four successful companies, John knows the secrets to creating a sellable business. John shares his own experiences and lessons learned, and talks about his new book, Built to Sell.
Podcast: Is Your Business Built to Sell?
For a limited time, get a $5.00 discount on John Warrillow's book, Built to Sell and a complimentary copy of "The Model for Selling Your Business" eBook.
In Built to Sell John shares with you:
John Warrillow is an entrepreneur, author and speaker. Throughout his career as an entrepreneur, John has started and exited four companies. Most recently he transformed Warrillow & Co. from a boutique consultancy into a recurring revenue model subscription business, which he sold to The Corporate Executive Board (NASDAQ: EXBD) in 2008. He is the author of Built to Sell and Drilling for Gold and in 2008 was recognized by BtoB magazine’s “Who’s Who” list. builttosell.com
When you use your personal credit card to buy business items, you instantly slash the amount of credit you have available to get the things you and your family need and want. If you’re like most people, you regard your credit cards as the financial cushion that will carry you through emergencies—such as an illness that makes it impossible to work, or catastrophic house repairs. It’s important to realize that wasting your credit on business expenses weakens your ability to use your personal credit as a safety net.
Still, many entrepreneurs ignore the dramatic consequences of this dangerous practice:
And, once their borrowing limits are maxed out … they persuade their spouses or other family members into using their credit to continue financing the business.
Be forewarned: if you convince your family members to finance your business, you’re just digging a deeper hole for your family to crawl out of. If your business fails your family could be wiped out financially.
Don’t ask family members to use their personal credit to invest in your business. Using your personal credit to pay for business expenses is a strategic error. And if it doesn’t make sense for you, the business owner, it makes even less sense for family members. Our advice: keep everyone’s personal credit strictly separated from your company’s corporate credit.
If you need help incorporating or building good business credit, click here for a complimentary business credit consultation and to obtain our free e-Book, "Unlimited Business Financing—Without a Personal Guarantee”—a step-by-step process for building a business credit asset.
Almost every business owner wants more leads for their business. In fact, for many owners the need for a constant inflow of qualified leads often dominates their thinking. There are, however, many challenges to ensuring and maintaining that supply. And, in addition to the needs of today, growth objectives and profit goals will require increased revenue which must come from increased sales—which means more leads. So are there really “sure-fire” methods of lead generation? And, if so, what are they?
Truly successful lead generation must always be an integrated part of your marketing strategy. And this rests on having a comprehensive plan that takes into account the demographics and psychographics of your target market, as well as your positioning—the perception of your business and your product/services held by that target market. In other words, your lead generation efforts must be guided by who it is you are ideally trying to attract to your business and what it is you’re promising them.
A mistake many business owners make with lead generation activities is to simply try different things with no real thought about who their ideal customers are, where they are, and how to best reach them. Random acts of lead generation produce random results—and a very questionable ROI.
Assuming you have effectively put together a strategic marketing plan and you know your ideal target market customer, what can you do right now to generate some solid, qualified leads?

Here are some tried-and-true methods for getting good leads quickly:
The real key to generating more leads is how well you know your most probable customers—your target market. This is why making lead generation a systemic part of your marketing is so important. However, even though continual research and quantification of data on your target market is essential, it’s also critical to avoid getting stalled by too much analysis and not enough action! It was the American General and military strategist George S. Patton, who said: “A good plan, violently executed today, is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” A good strategy supported by some effective tactics will result in the leads you need.
What lead generation activities do you rely on? What's worked for you in the past? Post a comment and tell us about it.
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So many of us start out new businesses with a technician's mindset. Thinking that because we are good at our craft, we will be good at running a successful company. This is a flawed way of thinking and causes so many small businesses to fail. The Neo CEO is here to help those technicians who find themselves in the role of business owner without the knowledge or skills necessary to run a successful business. By teaching you how to vision the business as separate from you - the owner - the Neo CEO will give you the foundations necessary to run a successful organization.