An authoritative and well-organized “sell smart” guide.
A manual offers expert advice on selling a business.
Coffey, who wrote The Private Equity Playbook(2019) and has “bought, sold, and financed around one hundred companies in twenty years,” makes a compelling argument for owners to prepare for a business sale years before they’re ready. Whether or not they heed that sound advice, entrepreneurs are sure to benefit from the author’s wisdom. This four-part “playbook” covers the bases: looking at buyers, preparing a business for sale, working with advisers, and managing the sale process. Part 1 addresses two basic types of buyers: strategic and financial. Coffey compares and contrasts them, supplying insights into each. Included is a nifty formula to estimate the size of a target financial buyer. A brief section discusses other buyer types, including Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, which are currently in vogue. Part 2 is all about preparing for a business sale; the information shared by the author here is invaluable. Coffey provides a clear definition of the variations of “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciations, and amortization”—“a measure by which all companies are valued by most strategic and financial buyers.” He deftly explains such key financial terms as cash-basedversus accrual-based accounting, generally accepted accounting practices, and quality of earnings. He also delivers a useful chapter that will likely help business owners increase the value of their companies by isolating their real estate holdings from any sale. Tax advisers, accountants, attorneys, and investment bankers are considered in Part 3. Not only does Coffey describe these roles succinctly, he also presents lists of questions to ask when evaluating such professionals. In Part 4, the author does an excellent job of detailing a typical business sale process, including steps, documentation, and meetings. The “example questions” to ask financial or strategic buyers are sure to help any seller garner vital information. This section also features sage counsel regarding how sellers should behave and why it could be beneficial for them to remain involved in a company even after a sale. Business owners who digest the instructive material in this book should be far better prepared for a maximum value sale.
An authoritative and well-organized “sell smart” guide.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5445-2303-3
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.
Want to get ahead in business? Consult a dictionary.
By Wharton School professor Berger’s account, much of the art of persuasion lies in the art of choosing the right word. Want to jump ahead of others waiting in line to use a photocopy machine, even if they’re grizzled New Yorkers? Throw a because into the equation (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), and you’re likely to get your way. Want someone to do your copying for you? Then change your verbs to nouns: not “Can you help me?” but “Can you be a helper?” As Berger notes, there’s a subtle psychological shift at play when a person becomes not a mere instrument in helping but instead acquires an identity as a helper. It’s the little things, one supposes, and the author offers some interesting strategies that eager readers will want to try out. Instead of alienating a listener with the omniscient should, as in “You should do this,” try could instead: “Well, you could…” induces all concerned “to recognize that there might be other possibilities.” Berger’s counsel that one should use abstractions contradicts his admonition to use concrete language, and it doesn’t help matters to say that each is appropriate to a particular situation, while grammarians will wince at his suggestion that a nerve-calming exercise to “try talking to yourself in the third person (‘You can do it!’)” in fact invokes the second person. Still, there are plenty of useful insights, particularly for students of advertising and public speaking. It’s intriguing to note that appeals to God are less effective in securing a loan than a simple affirmative such as “I pay all bills…on time”), and it’s helpful to keep in mind that “the right words used at the right time can have immense power.”
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063204935
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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