Have you ever noticed how some of your best business ideas hit you when you’re on vacation?

I’m not sure if being relaxed allows the mind to operate on a more creative plane, or if it is just being observant to the way people do things differently, but when I travel, my entrepreneurial mind kicks into over drive.

I’m writing to you today from Aix-en-Provence where my family and I have spent the month of July. France isn’t exactly a bastion of entrepreneurialism (something like half the population works for the state in some capacity) but even here, my mind was spinning on new business ideas.

Fresh business ideas

Take for example the way the French peddle sports equipment. On the outskirts of Aix they have a sports multiplex called “Oxylane Village”. The anchor is a massive (think Walmart superstore) Decathlon sports store that is a mash up of an REI, Dick’s and Disneyland for sports enthusiasts. They have 50 isles of sports gear for every possible activity. They have an entire aisle dedicated to swimming goggles for example.

New ways to sell

Decathlon not only has everything you’d need for even the most peculiar of sporting pursuits, they also make buying the regular gear an experience. They have testing centers for just about any sport you can imagine: you can try a new racket on a mini tennis court set up with a ball machine to lob you floaters; there’s a putting green; scaled down soccer pitch; bike paths and it goes on. Outside is an entire village of kids sports activities including trampolines, zip lines, go carts etc.

I’ve never seen anything like Decathlon in North America, which is why my mind started racing about the North American retail concepts that are ready to be disrupted by offering customers an entirely new experience.

Not only do long vacations offer plenty of new business ideas, they are also a great way to test how ready your business is to be sold (the more it can run without you, the easier it will be to fetch a premium price for your company). To that end, and in case you needed any additional justification for a nice long break this summer, here are a couple of my recent articles on how a sabbatical is an essential ingredient in creating a sellable business:

Test your company’s value by going on vacation

~published July 21, 2010 the Globe and Mail

A holiday can be a good way to test how well your business can run without you — in other words, how sellable it is.

I had been running my research business for five years when I decided I needed a proper vacation. Not one of those quasi-vacations when you take your mobile to Florida for a week and check in three times a day. I needed a real vacation. »more

Sabbatical by the boss leads to attempted takeover

~ published July 20, 2010 the Globe and Mail

Recently I read about a guy who flew around France in a solar-powered plane for 26 hours without using a drop of fuel. The planning and plotting apparently took years, with a team of engineers thinking through every aspect of getting a plane aloft on the power of the sun and then storing enough battery power to keep it airborne throughout the night. After years of planning on land, someone actually had to get inside the plane and take a test flight. »more

Three ways to find out what your business is worth

~ published July 22, 2010 the Globe and Mail

It’s natural to want to know what your business is worth, but it can be hard to find out.

Years ago I owned a marketing and design agency and I used to rely on the multiples the big advertising-agency holding companies got on the stock exchange. I’d assumed that, because Omnicom was trading at 22 times earnings, my little agency with $150,000 in profit was worth around $3 million. »more

Selling Your Business? The 2 Most Important Numbers to Analyze

~ published July 22, 2010 BNET

I was on my way home when I got the call I had been expecting from the mergers and acquisitions firm I was using to sell my company. I pulled over — this conversation was going to require some focus.

“We have two offers we’d like to meet to discuss,” said my banker.  »more

photo courtesy of Flickr/Meagan

This morning I read a story in The New York Times that General Motors (GM) is preparing a public stock offering and analysts estimate the value of GM to be $50 billion to $90 billion.

What I find interesting is the huge range analysts estimate the company to be worth. There’s a $40 billion dollar gap between the high and the low; the low estimate is almost half that of the high.

It seems nowhere is pricing so subjective — so much in the eye of the beholder — than with a business. Can you imagine your real estate agent saying your house could fetch $500,000 or $900,000? You’d probably find a new real estate agent.

Despite all of the Wharton-educated analysts with their pivoting spreadsheets, valuing a company is still little more than a grownup game of pin the tail on the donkey.

When it comes to getting the highest price for your business, I have found it important to reserve your best selling skills for selling your business not your product, which is what I write about in my favorite (and the first) of the three articles below….

Make selling your business the top priority

~ published July 15, 2010 the Globe and Mail

Have you ever seen a speaker who said something that changed the way you think?

The most memorable speech I can remember hearing took place in 2002 at the executive education campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. »more

Are you letting your customers wag the dog?

~ published July 13, 2010 the Globe and Mail

I have found giving customers too much choice can be a detriment to building a sellable company. I learned this the hard way when my first attempt at building a scalable service business flopped.

I had read a glowing article about Jupiter Research (now part of Forrester Research), an analyst firm that provided its studies to customers through a subscription offering. Jupiter would do one piece of research and present it to all of its customers. Finally, I thought, a model that brought some scale and leverage to the consulting business. »more

Are bossy customers undermining your business?

~ published July 14, 2010 the Globe and Mail

Yesterday I shared the perils of giving customers too much choice in what they buy. Today I’d like to share my experience around giving customers too much say in how you make what they buy.

First, some background: a decade ago I tried to scale up a subscription research offering similar to a Bloomberg or Forrester research program–you know, the model by which a customer subscribes to a pre-set number of reports provided to all. »more

photo courtesy of Flickr/Daniel Morris

Have you ever watched the Randy Pausch video called “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”?

Pausch was a 45-year old father of three and professor at Carnegie Mellon University when he discovered he had terminal pancreatic cancer.

Instead of wallowing in his misfortune, he decided to sign up for “The Last Lecture” which challenges professors to imagine they are going to die; then give their last talk to their students in which they must impart their most important life lessons.

Unfortunately for Pausch, his wife and three kids, it was not a hypothetical scenario. Somebody taped the lecture and posted it to YouTube where upon it gained a life of its own generating more than eleven million unique views by the time I stumbled on it yesterday.

At the end of the video Pausch surprises everyone by revealing that the primary audience for the speech was not those in the room, but that he was giving the lecture so that one day his kids could hear their father’s most important life lessons first hand. I was in tears as he revealed this twist in the last seconds of the video.

I was so moved that I starting Googling “Pausch and The Last Lecture” and discovered Pausch had become quite a celebrity as a result of his YouTube video. There were interviews with Diane Sawyer on ABC NEWS, The Wall Street Journal and Katie Couric.

In one of the final interviews before his death on July 25, 2008, Pausch commented on how some detractors were accusing him of profiteering from his diagnosis. Pausch responded by explaining that the reason he gave the lecture was that he is fundamentally a teacher and he thought is was the highest and best use of his time left to teach his most import students: his kids first and secondly the rest of his students.

You may be asking what all this has to do with building a sellable company. The answer is, not much. Pausch inspired me this week to want to keep writing and sharing my business experiences with you.  I thought I should pass on the video in case it helps you to get in touch with why you wanted to start your own business in the first place and why you want to grow it into a valuable — sellable — company.

Hope you enjoy the video and my latest articles on selling a business below.

Thinking of investing in commercial real estate?

~ published July 6, 2010 the Globe and Mail

Early in my career, I owned a small marketing services business. Beyond a few computers and desks, we didn’t have any assets to speak of.

I feared I wasn’t building any equity in my business but, rather, just peddling hours. I decided I would look into buying a piece of commercial property to operate from as a hedge in case my business turned out to be worthless. I reasoned that at least I could sell the property when it was time to move on.  »more

Bright ideas need not rest on deep pockets

~ published July 7, 2010 the Globe and Mail

Last week I met with Scott Armstrong, one of the three co-founders of Brainrider, a new business in Toronto designed to help companies like Yellow Pages and Pitney Bowes use their online content to attract more customers.

Brainrider was founded in January, and I think Armstrong and his partners, John Kewley and Nolin LeChasseur, are well on their way to building a valuable, sellable business. »more

The Secret to Making Your Business Saleable

~ published July 8, 2010 BNET

If you’re a business owner and you’re still doing all of the selling yourself, your company may not be worth as much as you think.

Let me explain.

I used to own a five-person advertising agency. I did the selling, and my employees did the work. We squeezed out $150,000 in pre-tax profit from $750,000 in revenue designing brochures and websites. »more