Exit Planning Tools for Business Owners

management

EBITDAC : What is Your Business Worth Now?

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Several friends have sent me a picture of an EBITDAC coffee mug this week. As it states, EBITDAC stands for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, Amortization and Coronavirus. Will this be the new measure of cash flow for valuing your business?

EBITDACA bleak joke, but one that is on the minds of many business owners, especially Baby Boomers in their late 50s and 60s. Many were postponing their exit planning because business has been so good. As one client told me, “In March we had the best year in the history of my company. It looks like April might be the worst.”

Downturns aren’t new, and recent history has more “Black Swan” downturns than most. Boomer owners have lived through the dot-com crash, 9-11, and the financial/housing bust. Even the Great Recession, however, was when most Boomers were in their mid-40s to early 60s. Most had ample time to recover, and to resume their business-building activities.

This downturn hits 4,000,000 Boomer owners when the youngest is at least 55 years old. The recovery time is uncertain, and regulatory restrictions on their businesses may be reimposed, perhaps more than once.

Factoring the Coronavirus in Valuations

Most Main Street acquisitions (under $3,000,000) rely on financial results over the previous five years for valuation. Those years have generally been good. In the middle market, professional buyers’ due diligence requests often seek results from 2008-2009 as an indicator of a business’s resilience in a contracting economy.

I think we can safely assume that both Main Street and mid-market acquirers will be carefully looking at the sustainability of your business through COVID-19. How much it affects your company’s valuation will depend largely on what type of business you own, and how you reacted to both any shutdown and the period immediately following.

One issue will be how buyers perceive the impact of Paycheck Protection Program loans and their forgiveness. It appears at the moment that the PPP loans will not be considered taxable income when forgiven. There are IRS rules for non-taxable loan forgiveness, but it will likely still appear as additional margin on your books. (The expenses it paid will still be deductible.)

You can be certain that buyers will be backing out the PPP loan forgiveness when valuing your business. They won’t be very interested in paying multiples of a one-time “free money” event.

EBITDAC : Short and Long Term Impact

Some businesses will see an immediate effect on their selling prices. Others may have a lingering change in how buyers look at their worth.

First, buyers will look at the scope of the coronavirus’ impact. Restaurants, caterers, event support, transportation (airlines, rental cars, party buses) and other hospitality related industries will be the worst. Not only are they the most affected, but they face the possibility that they resume with limitations on their business (social distancing in restaurants or limited passengers in vehicles, for example.) Any buyer would have to anticipate another period where they can’t generate substantial, or any, revenue.

If a business like those survives the shutdown, finding a buyer will be challenging. Third-party lenders will shy away from any involvement. Cash flow will remain tight, and credit will be harder to find.

The good news for those businesses is that the virus will end. When it is no longer a threat (presumably either because we find a vaccine, or we build herd immunity after a couple of seasons,) valuations should return to something more normal.

Other businesses will see valuations change over a longer period of time, and for different  reasons. They will be judged either by their ability to recover quickly, or by how their model changes to take advantage of life after the virus.

Regardless of the impact, some owners will use the pandemic as an excuse for years to come. Others will adjust and move forward. (See my description of an owner who was still blaming the Great Recession a decade later here.)

Planning for Your Comeback

Whether your business is essential and working much like before the pandemic, or non-essential but functioning pretty well remotely. this virus is going to change your strategy.

For an obvious example, lets take video conferencing. How are you preparing your sales team for the return to normal? Will they be more efficient? Are they able to cold call? Should their expense accounts be lower? Or are they (and you) just waiting to go back to what they did before?

If you are a manufacturer or a contractor, perhaps your business has been very healthy during this lock-down. What will happen afterwards? Will new competitors push into your market to replace business that they lost? Might some customers fade away, while others discover a newfound need for your offerings?

If you are surviving, how can you thrive? Do you expect landlords with empty space to negotiate cheaper rents? Will some skilled employees be looking for new jobs? Should others become pricier because of increased demand for their skills? Can the automation you implemented for remote work be extended to new efficiencies or new opportunities?

EBITDAC and Post-Coronavirus Exit Planning

If you were anticipating retirement before the pandemic, are you accelerating your plans or putting them on hold for a while longer?

In either case, you’ll need to understand the impact of the virus on your company’s value. EBITDAC 2It may be dramatic and immediate, or it may be only obvious afterwards when your performance is matched against that of your peers.

The definition of a Black Swan is “An unpredictable or unforeseen event, typically one with extreme consequences.” COVID-19 certainly fits the definition. It already has extreme consequences, but many of those are yet to come.

It’s not hard to figure out. Those who plan for a different world will do better than those who are taken by surprise. In either case, the impact of the “C” in EBITDAC will greatly influence any value generated by your transition from your business.

John F. Dini, CExP, CEPA is an exit planning coach and the President of MPN Incorporated in San Antonio Texas. He is the publisher of Awake at 2 o’clock, and has authored three books on business ownership.

Selling to Employees: Exit Planning for Small Business Part 4

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Selling to employees is one method of transition that is growing rapidly in popularity. Usually the  driving motivation is a desire to help the people who got you this far enjoy some of the benefits of ownership, but there is a substantial list of other benefits.

  1. Pricing is agreed at the start, not in adversarial negotiations.
  2. Valuation is flexible. The business can be sold for more or less than its Fair Market Value, as long as both sides agree and cash flow supports it.
  3. The legacy of the business lives on in the community.
  4. Where there are substantial challenges to an outside buyer, such as industries whpiere work goes to the lowest bidder, employees are more confident that they can succeed in the system.
  5. Financing is built into the transition plan.

(By the way, if you are just picking up this series now, prior topics included strategies that aren’t suited to small business, selling to a third party, and selling to family.)

“But they have no money!”

That’s the most frequent objection when we suggest an employee sale, but it is easily remedied by time. In fact, time and risk are corollaries. The more time you have, the less risk you’ll take. Faster is riskier.

At one end of the spectrum we’ll say you want to exit the business in the next thirty to sixty days. That’s probably enough time to draw up a purchase agreement and transfer ownership. The payment for the business would be entirely in an installment note from your workers. Rapid exit, but maximum probability that you will never see the entire purchase price.

On the other hand, what if you have five to ten years for selling to employees?  You could sell stock for a note, and let employees pay for their shares with bonuses based on increasing profitability. They are motivated to grow the company, while you continue to receive all the profits you were due anyway.

As they increase their ownership, they can qualify for lender financing to purchase your equity. Done well, and with enough time, you can realize the full value of the business and increase your short-term income along the way. Time gives you lower risk, and the potential for higher reward.

Are they qualified?

That is another question entirely and one that depends largely on you. If you’ve hired the right people and trained them well, selling to employees is a breeze. If you are the center of everything that happens in your business, it could be a problem.

Remember, the more you work in your business the less it is worth. To see how dependent your business is on you, take the quiz at www.ownercentricity.com.

What if they are willing and able, but not ready? Or perhaps you have a few key managers, but they lack some critical skill sets? Again, time gives you the flexibility to deal with those issues.

You may not have anyone who could ever run the business. Again, with suffcient time, you can “hire your buyer.” I’ve seen businesses where an owner used the promise of ownership to recruit someone whom he’d never attract otherwise.

Selling to employees is the ultimate exit plan in your level of control over the process, determining how much you want from the transaction, and choosing your date of departure. If you haven’t considered it in your list of options, you might want to think again.

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Exiting a Small Business Part 1

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Owners who are exiting a small business are often stymied by the range of choices in exit planning. Most literature on the topic discusses seven or eight avenues to exit.

A sale to a third party can be to an entrepreneur, private equity (including family offices,)  or a strategic acquirer. Internal sales can be to family, or employees via  a Leveraged Buy-Out (LBO- often called a Management Buy-Out or MBO.) There is also a sale to an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) or the oldest method in the book, closing down the company.

While the jargon is appealing to those advisors who want to sound smart, most of it doesn’t apply to the 90% of owners who have fewer than 20 employees. For those owners, about half of those options aren’t realistic. Here’s why (or why not.)

Exits That Don’t Apply to Small Business

Strategic acquirers, as the term suggests, seek a strategic addition to their business. Very few small companies have exclusive rights to a product or territory. Even fewer have proprietary intellectual property (patents or software.) In fact, if you have less than 20 employees the odds are you do about the same thing as several competitors in your own geographic area. No strategic value there.

Private Equity Groups and Family Offices have a fiduciary responsibility to their investor/owners. The level of due diligence needed to protect their interests makes a small transaction hard to support. They traditionally look for companies with more than $1,000,000 of cash flow after owner compensation, and many will only consider two or three times that amount. That’s too rarefied a level for most businesses with a dozen employees.

ESOPs are a great transfer vehicle, but until they loosen the regulatory environment (some laws are being proposed) they usually cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete, and another $50,000 or more for annual compliance thereafter. Too rich for most small businesses.

When I say “small business,” I mean one with five or more employees. Smaller than that usually describes one person with some helpers. That’s more like a job, and closing is often the only avenue to exit.

Exits That Do Apply to Small Business

So, when exiting a small business with between five and twenty employees, you have three choices left. Sell to another individual, to your employees, or your family. If you don’t have family in the business, your choices become even simpler. You can flip a coin, but even for small business owners exiting is usually a major financial event. It’s still worth putting some time and energy into planning.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll discuss the three avenues for exiting a small business. Stay tuned.

Invest 15 Minutes and take our FREE Exit Readiness Assessment. We do not request any confidential information.

John F. Dini develops transition and succession strategies that allow business owners to exit their companies on their own schedule, with the proceeds they seek and complete control over the process. He takes a coaching approach to client engagements, focusing on helping owners of companies with $1M to $250M in revenue achieve both their desired lifestyles and legacies

Manage Activities; Lead for Results

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A few weeks ago I posted a comment in the Business Journals Leadership Trust Forum about a life lesson I learned. The difference between effort and outcomes – Manage Activities; Lead for Results.

They reached out and asked if I could expand my comments a bit. Those of you who know me won’t find it surprising that it grew into an article.

You can find it here. I hope you enjoy it. Remember, lead for results.

 
Invest 15 Minutes and take our FREE Exit Readiness Assessment. We do not request any confidential information.

John F. Dini develops transition and succession strategies that allow business owners to exit their companies on their own schedule, with the proceeds they seek and complete control over the process. He takes a coaching approach to client engagements, focusing on helping owners of companies with $1M to $250M in revenue achieve both their desired lifestyles and legacies

Is Google Making Us Stoopid?

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As an Exit Planner, most of my engagements involve assessing a management team. They may be the intended buyers of the company, or else they are key factors in the saleability of the business.

The biggest and most frequent complaint I hear about managers is that they don’t know how to THINK. Business owners lament the inability of employees to discern critical paths, assess alternatives, or analyze complex problems.

Examples of Thinking Shortfalls

A CPA is doing a final review of a client’s tax returns, as prepared by an associate. As with many business owners, the client has two related entities, one acting as the management company for the other.

The reviewing partner notices the income from management fees in one entity, but no corresponding expense deduction in the other. The associate explains that the client’s books didn’t show the offsetting expense, so he ignored it.

The owner of an IT services company receives an irate call from a client. His technician has just spent two billable hours on the client’s PC, and it still won’t print his documents.

When the employee is asked for an explanation, he points out that the client said he needed updates to his printer drivers, and that is exactly what he (the technician) did. At no point did he try to determine whether updating the drivers would solve the customer’s problem, or even what that problem was.

The customer made a request, and the technician complied. He didn’t perceive the customer’s lack of technical knowledge as a factor.

As the adage goes, “When someone asks you for a drill, what he really wants is a hole.” If you are in any business where the customer expects you to be more knowledgeable than him (and why would he hire you otherwise?) thinking is a core competency.

I Can Look Up the Answer

Numerous educators and managers have related to me the effect of the Internet. Students resist rote learning. Employees refuse to train in procedures. Their answer is ubiquitous; “Why do I have to know that? I can look it up whenever I need it.”

In some circles, gaining “knowledge” is a game of speed and skill. Participants in a conversation whip out their electronic lozenges upon any reference to a historical fact, person or thing name, geography question, et al, ad infinitum. (Don’t know Latin? No problem. Google it.)

What is eroding is the concept that an answer may not be the best answer, or even a good answer. It’s just an answer.

Life isn’t “Fill In the Blanks”

Getting an answer doesn’t mean you’ve solved a problem. What we are losing is the ability for critical thinking. For saying “Wait a minute. That is one approach, but might there be others? Is there a better answer?”

We used to have to work through that step by step in our brains. Now we are becoming conditioned to accepting the answer on a little screen as the final word.  It’s great for learning how to change a faucet, but maybe not so hot for solving a customer complaint.

Your management team is the most important factor in realizing value for your business.  If you are planning a fully controlled (time, method, and proceeds) internal transition, they are your buyers and the guarantors of any financing you may underwrite. If you are selling to an external buyer, he or she wants to see a business capable of running (and making good decisions) without you.

Either way, you need to teach them how to think.

Invest 15 Minutes and take our FREE Exit Readiness Assessment. We do not request any confidential information.

John F. Dini develops transition and succession strategies that allow business owners to exit their companies on their own schedule, with the proceeds they seek and complete control over the process. He takes a coaching approach to client engagements, focusing on helping owners of companies with $1M to $250M in revenue achieve both their desired lifestyles and legacies