If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else.  You need a plan — a strategic plan. A-R Partners offers a management workshop to help your team develop a strategic plan.  Services include:

• Goal-setting: who you are and what you want to achieve.
• Values: what values are important to you and your stakeholders.
• SWOT Analysis: the strengths and weaknesses of your business, and the opportunities and threats it is facing.
• Strategies: what strategies enable you to take advantage of your opportunities, and counteract your threats.
• Measurement: explore systems to measure the effectiveness of your strategies – you cannot manage what you cannot measure.
• Plan Development: AR Partners can work with you to develop your written strategic plan so that everyone on your team is on board with your goals and your plans to achieve success.

Whether you are an individual looking to buy your first business, or a larger organization seeking a strategic acquisition, choosing the right business can be a turning point in your path to success. No acquisition is a guaranteed winner. But by carefully identifying your purchase criteria, evaluating (without emotion) potential targets against your criteria, negotiating the optimal deal structure and strategically planning the post-acquisition integration, you will find yourself in the winners’ circle more often than not.

We have seen a lot of successful acquisitions — and a few ugly ones. We know what it takes to achieve success. We can help you identify, plan and execute acquisitions that add value to your business. And we will help you through the critical due diligence phase, so that any skeletons come out of the closet before closing, rather than after.

But “closing the deal” is not the end of the work. Many great acquisitions fall apart after the deal is done, when the new business is integrated into the existing organization. We will work with management from both companies to plan and execute a successful post-acquisition integration.

Increasing productivity, quality and performance is what all businesses hope to achieve. A-R Partners has seen many corporations work through efficiency programs, and knows what it takes to succeed.  Through a series of management workshops, we can work with your team to achieve success.  Services include:

• Invest in a quality program that prevent problems, rather than fixing what goes wrong.
• Determine the factors that lead to success, and create systems to measure them.
• Ensure managers understand their own critical success factors/key performance indicators, and that they are constantly monitoring them.
• Develop reliable and timely communication channels, so that you can listen to your customers, suppliers, employees and other business partners.
• Seek ways to reduce or eliminate waste.

You always need to look at your business in terms of resale value.  Who doesn’t want to receive maximum value.  Even if you are years away from planning to exit your business, you never know when you will need to sell. A-R Partners offers a Value-Enhancement workshop that will help you:

• Identify and evaluate the 54 different value drivers that are relevant to most businesses.
• Determine the risks associated with owning your business.
• Develop strategies to reduce risk and enhance value.
• Improve future growth and profitably.
• Leverage your business value to greater heights.
• Implement systems to measure the success of these strategies and their impact on value.
• Increase the overall resell value of your business as compared to other in your industry.

 All privately held business owners will one day exit their business.  Whether the exit is voluntary or involuntary, planning now will ensure that both the owner and the business are “exit-ready”, that the value of the business is optimized, and that a tax-efficient structure is in place to maximize after-tax proceeds.
The A-R Partners team works with business owners to:

• Identify factors that impact value for their business
• Develop and implement strategies to enhance value factors
• Ensure the corporate structure, tax planning and personal financial planning are optimized to maximize net proceeds to the owner upon exit
• Review strategies to ensure the business owner is prepared for “life after exit”
• Identify and implement strategies to ensure the continuity of business success for the prospective purchasers after the current owner has exited.

Learn more.  Visit the Exit & Succession Planning page.