Preparing your business for investors

Business owners often view investors as an alternative to bank finance. In most cases entrepreneurs would seek to raise external equity because they are running out of cash and were turned down by a bank. The only message that investors would receive is that the entrepreneur lost control of their business regardless of how you dress the situation up. If you were an investor, would you want to put your hard-earned cash and invest significant amount of time in such a venture?

So, when is the right time to start raising external equity? And what can one do to ensure that the business is ready to attract and secure investors?

Succession Planning: Business owners favour MBO as means of selling business

Whilst the economy continues to wobble with an increasing number of vendors struggling to find trade buyers for their ventures, more and more business owners are considering management buyouts (MBOs) as an option of selling their businesses.

How can businesses survive in today's economic climate?

In the article “Has Western capitalism failed?” the BBC World Service’s Business Daily programme asked a number of leading figures if they thought whether the Western-style capitalism failed. The answers (and some of the comments) are worth a read. It would appear that those interviewed by the BBC are unanimous in their comments that the system itself hasn’t failed, but rather its interpretation by those who use it.