"Fill In The Blank"

We've been plannin' this weekend for a week and a half
Hope you ain't thinkin' that we're movin' too fast
This trip can be whatever you want it to
I'll pick where we go and you can pick what we do
We could
In the water, in the truck
On a blanket 'til the sun comes up
With each other on the river bank
Yeah I'll leave it up to you, baby fill in the blank
I know a little spot thirty miles outta town
We can do what we want, won't be nobody around
I love hanging with your friends and your family too
But there's some things that only two people should do
We could
In the water, in the truck
On a blanket 'til the sun comes up
With each other on the river bank
Yeah I'll leave it up to you, baby fill in the blank
We could
In the water, in the truck
On a blanket 'til the sun comes up
With each other on the river bank
Yeah I'll leave it up to you, baby
We could
To some music real slow
'Til we can't no more
If the clouds roll in we could, in the rain
Yeah I'll leave it up to you, baby fill in the blank
Yeah the options are endless, baby fill in the blank
Oh Yeah

Crossing your fingers isn’t the path to a business sale. Planning is.

Maybe you started planning for a sale the day you launched your business by naming, structuring, and running it with the payoff of a sale in mind. Or maybe you just woke up one recent morning and decided then and there to get off the business-ownership treadmill, and now you want to know what to do to achieve the sale you’re hoping for. Selling Your Business For Beginner deals with all the variables you may be facing:

• You may be certain you want to sell, or you may be leaning toward a sale but also considering other business exit options.
• Your sale plans may involve a very, very small business or a company that’s on the big-business end of the small-business scale.
• Your timeline may be immediate, or you may be willing to take up to a year or more to strengthen your business before putting it up for sale.

Every business sale involves different factors, but all sales share one common truth: Your business will sell not when you’re ready, but when it’s ready and when a buyer thinks it’s worth the amount of money you’re asking for it. The purpose of this blog is to give you an edge in the crowded marketplace you’re entering by helping you get your business into sale-ready shape and walking you through every step of the sale process.

Selling Your Business For Beginner is a guide through the world of business sales — a world to be traveled by some three-quarters of a million business owners over the next few years, according to research by well-regarded universities and business alliances. To give you an idea of the traffic on the road you’ll be taking, projections are that one out of every six businesses owned by retirement ready entrepreneurs will go up for sale by 2010, up 15-fold from the number of business sales in 2001. Those staggering numbers mean that people seeking to buy businesses will have a huge selection of opportunities from which to choose.

To guide you on your way, this blog incorporates advice from an amazing group of people, including professionals in the legal, banking, and accounting fields, chief among them John Davies and the business sale specialists at Sunbelt Business Brokers, the largest business brokerage in the world.

Together, we’ve seen to it that this blog includes everything you need to know about selling your small business. This blog also has a CD-ROM that includes planning checklists, forms, worksheets, links to useful Web sites, sample sale documents, and a template you can use in a fill-in-the-blanks manner to create the selling booklet, called a selling memorandum, that you’ll use to explain your sale offering to serious buyer prospects.