The original title for this article was going to be: "You mean I have to pay taxes on this?" This was inspired by conversations with a number of business brokers, because someone who has owned a business for 30 years, just might forget.  If you own a business, chances are that someday will want to sell your business.  What some owners forget is that when they sell their business (and not everyone can), capital gains taxes will be due!  This article was written for owners as a reminder of how important it is to  'think early'.  

“When planning for a year, plant corn. When planning for a decade, plant trees. When planning for life, train and educate people.” - Chinese Proverb

Early in my career, I supported the technology for sales teams and marketing departments.

In one company, the turnover rate for one of the sales team roles was very high. I watched 12 salespeople cycle through the role. Finally, a new sales person came onboard who sold more in one month than everyone else combined.

The management became more enthusiastic and chose to add a second sales person hoping to double sales... but the plan failed.  The second salesperson provided less than 10% more sales per year compared to the top salesperson.

This introduces us to the problem of how to calculate sales capacity.

I have had several people submit articles that I have had to reject. In one article the writer tried suggesting article titles. I want to encourage you to write articles, but don’t have the time to answer every email or try to correct every writer. Here are some obvious mistakes.

The Entrepreneurial Dilemma

"An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down." - Reid Hoffman

Every business starts out as an idea. Put the right idea with the right entrepreneur and out of the thousands of good ideas, a single organizational foundation may be laid. From that foundation, a new organization is built. Building that organization is the first stage of business that we’ll call the Vision 1.0 organization.

Cyber Security Planning Levels

This article discusses some of the levels of systems planning for almost any  business for protection from security breaches. Planning should include focus on these topics.

• Identify – Who is accessing the network resources
• Protect – How much access is given to each network resource
• Detect – Systems that identify unexpected or un-identify access to the network
• Respond – Once a breach is detected, how the company teams will respond
• Recover – If there is loss after the breach, how will the company resolve the loss

I recently attended the Cybersecurity Awareness Conference, sponsored by the Small Business Development Center (SBDC). In this conference, cybersecurity issues were covered. Some of the cybersecuirty experts who presented includ:

We love the stories about the small entrepreneur that in 10 years disrupts an industry.  The success story is told quickly and glosses over years of sweat, brilliance and painful growing pains.  I've always been intrigued by what's missing.  The story starts with an owner putting in an intense number of hours.  Then finishes with teams of people, working togehter and committed to the vision of the organization.  

Over the last 25 years I've worked with lot's of successful business owners, building thier technology.  You learn a lot from the brilliance and the mistakes made by brilliant (and not so brilliant) leaders.  I wanted to share a tactic that most brilliant leaders develop on thier path from success to industry leadership.

This is what you might call a Chicken or Egg question, "Which comes first?” It is a conundrum which can be difficult to answer and people affirm the truth to both sides of the argument. In this case, our chicken or egg can be equated to “Sales or Capacity.”

If sales come from selling widgets and the number of widgets sold determines sales, which comes first: The ability to make more widgets or the ability to sell more widgets?

Over the last 30 years, I’ve changed my point of view on this question more than once, depending on whether I was producing widgets or selling widgets.