Marcia Pledger, business columnist for The Plain Dealer and www.cleveland.com joins Jack Mencini and Adam Sonnhalter as their guest on Dirty Secrets of Small Business.
In this segement, the business coaches of Maximum Value Partners and Marcia discuss the element of trust with the small business owner.
A common theme with many small businesses is a lack of trust. One example that Marcia Pledger shared was a dry cleaner business where a woman who had been going to the Asian dry cleaners for many, many years decides to buy the business from the owner. The buyer did not conduct a thorough due diligence of the business because she had been going there for years and thought she knew everything she needed to know and just wanted to buy the business. What she thought she was buying was goodwill. What was reality was that the business was in debt, a lot of ill will and a whole lot of problems with the vendors to the dry cleaning business. She turned it around after a great deal challenges and hard times, but her biggest mistake was being too trusting of the current owner.
To buy a company, buy it right! The woman with the dry cleaners was able to salvage it, but it didn’t happen overnight.
Jack also shared that you can also buy companies without putting any money down.
On the subject of trust, Marcia explained that many small business owners don’t have a good amount of trust with their employees. Many small business owners don’t want to share the inner workings of their business. They need to share the direction of their company with their employees so that there is a good understanding of the business objectives to succeed.
People have to respect what they don’t know and with small business owners, they can’t know everything. One insight Marcia, Jack and Adam discuss is the need for the small business owner to work with their teams to have the best and the brightest add into the inner workings of the business to keep it on the path to success.
To hear more about the insights discussed on this April 3 broadcast with Marica Pledger, access this podcast and all the Dirty Secrets of Small Business podcasts on iTunes or here.
Do you have any How Questions of your own to email to Jack and Adam? Do it by sending your questions to radio@maximumvp.com or submit a question on their web site at https://maximumvp.com/how/
If you have a success story or a question you would like to share, email or call (radio@maximumvp.com or 877-849-0670). You can also call in during the show each week at noon (EST) – 1:00 pm on WINT 1330 AM, call 440-946-9468 to ask your question to the Maximum Value Partners’ coaches or tweet your question to @MaximumVP