You have built your business.  You did what you needed to do.  Now it’s time to consider selling the business and moving on.  Here are some simple but often overlooked things that you can do that can significantly increase the value to a prospective buyer of your business.  Organization Structure – The basic organizational question is: How is your business structured?  Do you have defined departments with recognized department heads or are the lines of authority and responsibility blurred?  If responsibilities and authorities are blurred sooner or later conflicts usually arise.  Are all the functions covered, which are necessary for the operation of the business?  Unassigned functions can be covered on an ad-hoc basis, but usually at the cost of large amounts of management time and pain.  Are there too many people reporting to you or any of your managers and making demands on your time?  If anyone has more than five direct reports they are probably spread too thin.  Relationships – Do people have clearly defined reporting relationships?  An employee who is unclear about to whom he reports, or who reports to him, will have difficulty sooner or later meeting the job requirements.  Is significant decision making authority delegated in the organization?  If yours is an organization, which is heavily “dictatorial”, in that only one person’s opinion (the boss’s) counts, then managers and supervisors are not learning how to think and manage.  Job Descriptions – Have you written job descriptions?  If not, you are probably not paying for performance, because you have no way of gauging if someone’s performance is below, at or above the requirements of their job.  Do you do performance appraisals of your employees at least annually?  If not, you are missing an opportunity to encourage your top performers and coach your under-performers to improve.  Marketing and Sales Growth Curve Position – Most products go through a cycle of birth, development, growth, maturity and decline.  Much has been written about this cycle and the subject is too complex to be fully covered here.  However, you can generally tell where your product is in the cycle.  During birth and development, the beginning stages, there is great uncertainty if the product will be successful, and the risks are great.  During growth and maturity, the middle stages, the risks are less, the product opportunities look better and the business will look more attractive to a buyer.  During product decline the perceived value of the product and the business will be lower. Information Systems Data Integrity – These days, with the low cost of good computer hardware and software, everyone can afford workable information systems.  Therefore, having good systems is no longer a variable in evaluating a business, it is a prerequisite.  There are too many good business opportunities with businesses for which good information is available for prospective buyers to waste time with businesses which don’t have good information.  Do your systems work reliably and consistently?  If they don’t, you should have them fixed.  Spend the money it takes to do it right, without going overboard, by using experienced vendors or consultants, and insisting on proven solutions.  Quality – There is an old saying: Garbage in – Garbage out.  The best system is worthless if the data is missing, corrupted or in error.  Have you taken the time to learn how to use your information systems properly?  Have you trained your people?  Do your business procedures, which support the information system, work the way they need to?  If you answered “no” to any of these questions you need to fix the procedures.  If you are not good at that sort of thing find someone who is, and just do it.  Accounting & Budgeting Budgets – Do you have reasonable budgets?  Winston Churchill said that a plan is nothing but planning is everything.  You should go through the exercise of re-examining your business and identifying strengths, weaknesses and opportunities.  Who are your best customers?  Why?  Who are your toughest competitors?  Why?  What external factors are changing?  What can sales likely be next year?  What do you need to do to achieve the sales goal?  How are raw materials costs expected to change?  How much will expenses change?  Ask yourself and your key managers these and related questions. You will need believable answers for these are questions that any serious purchaser will also be asking!  Accuracy of Information – Do you get good information on how well the business is doing at least monthly?  Every business needs financial reports prepared accurately and consistently on a monthly basis so management can plan corrective action for problem areas.   The reports should compare actual month and year-to-date numbers against comparable budget and last year.  Also, sales dollars and sales quantity are often best reported broken down both by product and by customer.  In summary, with a little clean-up you can put your business on a more solid footing and give yourself a better chance of realizing its full value.  Joel Krichiver, principal of MAS Associates, LLC, is an independent management consultant with more than eight years experience troubleshooting financial management, organizational development and information technology issues. Joel has been an operating company CFO in the baking and food, and packaging industries for over twenty three years. He holds an MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago and a BSE in Applied Physics Engineering from the University of Illinois (Chicago). He lives in the Kansas City area and may be contacted at joelk@everestkc.net. <<Click here>> to download a printable copy of this article.