8th June 2011

Buying and Selling Companies: Start with the End in Mind

Average people learn from their mistakes, stupid people repeat their mistakes and brilliant people learn from the mistakes and successes of others.

Since I’ve been doing work helping clients buy and sell companies, I have just re-read Richard Stielitz’s and Stuart Sorkin’s book, Expensive Mistakes When Buying and Selling Companies - and how to avoid them in your deals (Acuity, 2010).

Since success is in large part of the art of learning from the failures of others, it’s worth reading Stielitz’s and Sorkin’s thoughts and insights.

Stieglitz and Sorkin argue the most basic mistakes that many business owners make - is they don’t have an exit plan - “they don’t begin and run their companies with the end (their exit) in mind.”

In their introduction they make the point “a successful acquisition or sale is created three times: first in your imagination as a possibility, second in your plans as an objective, and third in reality as the result of your actions.”

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