Companies are sold all the time.
When is it time for you to sell yours?
Knowing when and ways to sell your company is considered to be probably the most overlooked aspects of entrepreneurship.
They just don’t teach it in business school, or swiftly mention it in passing, as if such a thing is self-evident and could not possibly want for any detailed examination.
One area that does attempt a more thorough look is accounting ethics.
Because of all the corporate scandals which have been regularly in the news, many skilled licensure boards through the country are now requiring ethics as a strong aspect of any continuing education credits earned.
Discovering how to legally and ethically sell your company has become a matter that concerns your accountants as well.
For it is the accountants who enable abusive practices that may mislead buyers or the public in particular.
The CEO of a publickt traded company could have his or her accountants make things look bad financially when preparing for a secretly prepared takeover.
With things looking bad due to the use of accounting gimmicks although the business is actually as sound as ever, the share cost will drop, allowing the company to be purchased at a great discount – with the CEO secretly rewarded to the melody of tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars.
Talk about knowing how to sell your company!
It isn’t only private investors that are damaged by such accounting shenanigans; think about one of the most typical scams perpetrated on the basis of the theory that private companies are usually more efficiently run than public ones: a public resource could be made to look inept and wasteful, leading to calls for its privitization.
The public officials in charge are then paid upon the completion of the sale, and suddenly everything appears great again.
But things were never bad to begin with; it was only through accounting sleight-of-hand that finances could have looked troubled at all.
