Business Today

Cerius Executives  CEO Pam Wasely recently led a discussion with CFOs to see what challenges they encounter that give them heartburn.

Business challenges that keep a CEO up at night.

Transcript Below: When to sell your business Pamela Wasley: I keep hearing from CEO’s today, “Well, look I’m ready to ready to sell my company so, I guess I should start talking to my competitor’s”, or “I could probably sell this company in the next 6 months.” What would you say to an owner on how to prepare his or her company for sale? I mean arent there things you need to do before you even start talking to people? Murray let’s start with you. Murray Rudin: So, I would say that and this touches a little upon some of the topics Steve covered exceptionally well a few minutes ago. But I would say that the owner needs to take a really honest look and then go. They have to realize that whatever flaws, warts, whatever you want to call them are on business are going to be found. They’ll be better off finding those warts themselves and finding, or mitigating or fix them before they start the process. SO that includes things like, obviously, get all your legal documents really diligently reviewed by a professional, be a lawyer not by your local lawyer. Have definitely get an audit from your financial statements, going back at least 2 or 3 years even if it costs a lot of money, you just want to have that. Because all of these things although they cost a lot of money upfront ultimately yield enormous ROI in terms of getting a better valuation on the back hand. If there are limitations in, as was mentioned, kind of the depth of your management team or you’ve got customer concentrations, supplier concentrations, major contracts that are nearing the end with customers that need to be, that really are critically valued business, that need to be reviewed in order that you get value form. Anything. You really got to be tough on yourself and on the business and say if I were the skeptic, what would I be worried about in this business in terms of predictability, revenue and earnings? And what can I do to mitigate that? And that mitigation effort will take time and therefore almost every business has some weaknesses so you really should start thinking about that whole identify the flaws and try to mitigate them a year before you really suspect to be selling the business. Sometimes more than that. Pamela Wasley: Right, thanks Murray. Anybody else have anything to add to that? John Hammett: Well, well your lead Pam was a classic because so often we find owners that say, “Oh, I can sell this. I know who’s going to buy it, my competitor across town I see him every year at the tradeshow and they’ll pay me a premium to get me out of the business.” In my view, selling to a competitor is probably one of the lowest value deals you can put together because there’s nothing new brought to the game. You already compete with them, if he’d wanted to hire your salesman he’d do that, and if he wanted to sell to your customers he’d go try to find them, but the customers go buy from you because they don’t like him. And there’s a negative synergy there. We love entrepreneurs. I’ve been an entrepreneur myself and they start, create fabulous companies. But they definitely do that on their own and they think that selling the company on their own is going to be easy. Um, what they’re going up against is very experienced buyers. And they need someone on their side of the table that brings equal experience and some insight as to where find the right buyer. Murray Rudin: Perhaps unexpectedly, I would agree with you on that. Folks might say, well as a buyer why would you want a seller to have strong representation? But in our experience, um, the having strong representation with somebody like John actually really, first of all it improves the likelihood of the process will get successfully completed as compared to a scenario where the seller does not have an advisor. And it helps the seller understand and get comfortable with what are the norms of the deal business. Ty

Why use a Contingent Workforce? andnbsp; On February 18th, Cerius Interim Executives Solutions CEO Pam Wasely, took part in a discussion on the benefits of the contingent workforce. Listen to what Pam has to say and if you have any questions feel free to visit us at www.ceriusexecutives.com  *** Welcome to the Cerius Executive podcast. Today we join our CEO Pam as she leads a discussion on the benefits of the contingent workforce. First lets talk a little bit about the factors impacting businesses today in driving them towards contingent work-forces. By the way, just so you know, contingent workers are in positions that are not permanent. SO could be seasonal employees, could be contractors, or could be independent contractors,  consultants, part-time employees. Those are your contingent workforce today. Lets start with technology since we all know how quickly that technology is changing today. I mean, lets take a look at whats happening with technology that we have here as compared to where it was before. Do you know that the telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million people? 50 million people in 75 years. An iPad; everybody thinks that the iPad has been around for a long time. It s only been around for a little over 4 years. They reached 50 billion people in less than 2 years. And then, theres Angry Birds. Angry Birds reached 50 million people in less than 30 days. I mean look at this. Technology is just changing so quickly. Another thing: the rising labour cost. You got taxes going up, you got health care going up, you got workers comp going up. You cant afford to be hiring on permanent employees all the time in your company today. you have to look for other alternatives. Demographics. The demographics is changing. You know it used to be that you could find all the talent that you need here in the United States and in England because thats where great talent used to be. But guess what, thats not true today. You cant find it in your own backyard. IN fact the population here in the United States and in England is decreasing and now 95% of the population growth in the future is going to be in emerging countries such as Russia, Brazil, India, China, Hong Kong, Singapore. Thats where your population growth. I got to tell you theres some great talent in those countries today that you can go to for contingent work-forces. And also the way that people look at work today, right now 36% of your workers are contingent. IN the year 2020, its predicted that now thats going to be 50%. So youre going to have lots of talent out there that you can access. Why use contingent workers? Because you need the flexibility, you need to be able to get workers in when and where you need them today. You cant wait to get talent in your companies today. Its too important. The pace of business is speeding up so you need that on-demand talent. It used to be that you could wait for 30,60 and 180 days to get a new employee on board. Well, sure you can still continue to do that but what happens to your company while youre trying to find that right person? Well, there;s talent out there on a contingent basis which you could bring in and supplement until you can find that great talent. So again, these are some of the reasons why theyre using contingent workers today. According to a study 62% of businesses last year put contingent workers in their talent strategy to achieve their goals, to achieve their objectives for 2014. And today that numbers even larger. And heres an interesting thing, how many people in here thought that your contingent workforce was really made up of baby boomers? How many? Can I have a show of hands? Nobody? OK thank you because I have to tell you most people I ask though, oh yeah thats all retired folks. Well its not. In fact if you could see here 56% is made up of baby boomers, of millennials and your X-gen. In fact, millennials love the ability to be contingent w