How To Choose The Right Investment Banker to Sell Your Business

With U.S. merger and acquisition activity up 34 percent this year, now might be a very good time to consider selling your business.

Part and parcel to this exploration is deciding whether or not to hire an investment banker to help you. And then, which one to choose.

But first, a word of caution.

3 Rules You Must Follow If You Want Your Company to Be Exceptional

If you want your company to be the best, there are three rules:
1. Be better.

2. Don't be cheap.

And 3. There are no other rules.

That's according to a recently released book co-authored by Deloitte director Michael Raynor and strategist Mumtaz Ahmed, The Three Rules: How Exceptional Companies Think (Portfolio/Penguin, 2013). Raynor, who earned his doctorate from the Harvard Business School, and Ahmed, along with a team of researchers, analyzed a database of 25,000 companies across hundreds of industries spanning 45 years to identify those companies that were statistically "exceptional."

How to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills and Make Better Business Decisions

As an entrepreneur, you make decisions every day that affect the success of your products, the loyalty of your employees, and the overall health of your business. To make the best decisions possible, you need to think critically and quickly to pick out any flaws in your processes that might harm your business.

When you think through a problem, your thought process is naturally colored by biases, such as your point of view and your assumptions about the situation.