Getting Out

You may wish to leave your business for a variety of reasons. For example, you may be ready to retire - if so, congratulations! - and you may wish to hand your business to a relative. Or perhaps your business did not live up to your expectations. Whatever the reason, be smart about how you make your exit.

Plan Your Exit

Do you know how you are going to exit your business? You may have a dream of going public, selling to the highest bidder, or retiring and handing over your business legacy to your family.

Steps to Closing a Business

If you are considering leaving your business below you will find suggested steps to follow in closing your business. Decide to close a business - sole proprietors can decide by themselves.

Selling Your Business

If you decide that selling your business is the right exit strategy for you, be sure that you cover all your bases. In order to sell your business officially, you will need to prepare a sales agreement.

Transfer of Ownership

As they say, all good things must come to an end. Maybe you'd like to retire, or maybe it's time to pass the family business to the next generation. For one reason or another, many business owners will face a time.

Legal Resources for Operating and Exiting a Business

There are many resources available to help you comply with the basic laws for conducting and exiting a business. Here is just a brief listing of articles that offer general assistance to specialized audiences.

Liquidating Assets

If you have decided to get out of business and are not able to pass your business on, merge it with another business, or sell it as a going concern, liquidating the assets could be the most appropriate exit strategy.

Filing for Bankruptcy Protection

Deciding to file for bankruptcy can be a painful decision, but you may find yourself in a position with no other options. To protect yourself and your business, educate yourself about this course of action before making the decision.

Three stages for dealing with a complaint

'How was it for you?' has a maximum of three stages for dealing with a complaint. Stage 1

Complaint will be dealt with by front line staff or manager of the service. Once you have made your complaint you can expect a full response within 10 working days. If we aren't able to deal with your complaint in full within this time we will contact you to advise you of the delay and to let you know when you can expect a full response.

Stage 2

Complaint will be reviewed by an appropriate senior manager.

If you are not happy with the outcome from stage 1, contact the customer feedback co-ordinator. They will arrange a review of your complaint. This review and response will not be by the same person who dealt with your complaint at stage 1. Again you can expect a full response within 10 working days or we will contact you to advise you of the delay and to let you know when you can expect a full response.

Stage 3

Complaint will be reviewed by the Director or a member of staff independent of the service acting on the Director's behalf. If you are not happy with the outcome from stage 2, contact the customer feedback co-ordinator. Our final review and response will be undertaken by the Director or a member of staff acting on the Director's behalf. As for the previous stages you can expect a full response within 10 working days or we will contact you to advise of the delay and to let you know when you can expect a full response.

If the stage 3 review doesn't resolve your complaint and you want to take it further you will need to take it to the Local Government Ombudsman.

If after any stage you don't get back to us within four weeks of our response to you we will consider that you have been satisfied with the response you have received.

As part of our ongoing improvement activities we will review each quarter by randomly selecting customers who have made a complaint and ask them how well they think we handled their complaint and whether they have any suggestions on how we could improve our complaints process.

Where else can you get help?

You may wish to ask for help at any stage from friends or relatives, your local councilor or MP.

The Citizens' Advice Bureau have staff who can help you make the complaint. Visit the Citizens' Advice Bureau website for more information.

Getting your complaint assessed by an independent body

You can complain to the Local Government Ombudsman, an independent organization which will investigate any sort of complaint about the council. But they will only do this after you've been through all of the stages of the council's complaints procedure.

Please ring the Customer Centre if you are unsure who you should contact about your complaint.

Giving Presentations

The presentation is starting. Dim the lights. Time for a nap. These are the thoughts of many audiences subject to yet another boring business presentation. How can you awaken the cognitive powers of your audience? Start by learning the 8 secrets of a knockout business presentation.

A Dig Deep

Having an effective business presentation that will have the audience on their feet requires more than the usual factoid dropped into your PowerPoint. Find a relevant fact beyond your topic norm. Give them the unexpected. The one obscure and contradictory piece of information that will raise heads and stimulate discussion. Where do you find such information? Go past the typical quick search engine scan. Check out educational websites for new research, interview industry mavericks, or scour the business press.

B Avoid Info Overload

PowerPoint expert Cliff Atkinson, author of Beyond Bullet Points says, "When you overload your audience, you shut down the dialogue that's an important part of decision-making." He points to some important research by educational psychologists. "When you remove interesting but irrelevant words and pictures from a screen, you can increase the audience's ability to remember the information by 189% and the ability to apply the information by 109%," recommends Atkinson.

C Practice Delivery

A knockout business presentation is so captivating it makes you forget about the speaker and become absorbed in the talk. Practice your delivery over and over until you remove the distractions including nervous tics and uncomfortable pauses. Pay particular attention to your body language. Is it non-existent or overly excessive? Good presenters work the stage in a natural manner.

D Forget Comedy

Business presenters will flirt with the temptation to deliver the stand up humor of Chris Rock. Remember your audience didn't come to laugh; this is a business presentation. Leave your jokes at home. It's OK to throw in a few natural off the cuff laughs but don't overdo it.

E Pick Powerful Props

You don't need a box full of props like the watermelon-smashing comic, Gallagher. A few simple props to demonstrate a point can be memorable in the minds of your target audience. Management guru, Tom Peters, uses a cooking timer to show how quickly factory expansion is occurring in China.

F Minimize You

"Frankly, your audience doesn't care as much about your company history, as they do about whether you can help them solve the specific problems they face. Write a script for your presentation that makes the audience the protagonist, or the main character, who faces a problem that you will help them to solve," says Atkinson.

G Speak the Language

A knockout business presentation doesn't leave people wondering what you said. It might be tempting to throw in a few big words but are you alienating your audience? Always explain terms and acronyms. The number of smart executives who aren't up on the latest terminology would surprise you.

 H Simple Slides

Beware of the PowerPoint presentation. Many corporate brains will turn off at the sight of yet another PowerPoint presentation. Over 400 million desktops currently have the PowerPoint application. If you want your business to stand out, don't be like everyone else. Use slides in your knockout presentation to highlight and emphasize key points. Don't rely on your slide projector to run the show.

It all comes down to what your audience walks away with in the end. Did you deliver another boring business presentation? Or did you persuade or motivate everyone to action? Apply the eight secrets to a knockout presentation and watch your ratings soar.

Words fail them

A It seems companies will soon begin to say goodbye to the written word. The basic unit of communication will no longer be typed out in e-mails. It will be shot in pictures and shown on video. Companies have already discovered that the written word is failing them. Its feebleness compared with the moving image was rammed home in 2010 when the sight of BP's oil spewing out into the Gulf of Mexico on YouTube sent a message to the world far more compelling than any written statement could ever be.

B If the word has become weak at conveying big corporate messages, it has become even weaker at conveying small ones. For years the in-boxes of all office workers have been overflowing with unread e-mails. But managers will do something about it and desist from communicating with staff in this way. E-mail will still exist as a way of talking to one person at a time, but as a means of mass communication it will be finished. Companies will find instead that to get a message over to employees, customers, shareholders and the outside world, video is far more effective.

C In the past three years video has come from nothing to make up nearly half of internet traffic; in another three, it is likely to be more than three-quarters. So far corporations have taken a back seat in this growth, but they will soon need to climb into the front and start to drive it.

D This shift in communications will have three important effects. It will change the sort of person who makes it to the corner office. It will alter the way that businesses are managed. And it will shift the position corporations occupy in society and possibly make us like some of them just a little bit more.

E The new corporate leaders will no longer be pen pushers and bean counters. The 20-year reign of faceless bosses will come to an end. Charisma will be back in: all successful business chiefs will have to be storytellers and performers. Just as political leaders have long had to be dynamite on TV to stand much hope of election or survival, so too will corporate leaders. They must be able to sell not only their vision of their companies but their vision of themselves. The new big boss will be expected to set an example; any leaders showing signs of human frailty will be out on their ears. The moral majority will tighten its hold on corporate life, first in America, but then elsewhere too.

F With this shift will come a change in management style. Numbers and facts will be supplanted by appeals to emotion to make employees and customers do what they are told. The businessperson's emotion may be no more genuine than the politician's, but successful bosses will get good at faking it. Others will struggle: prepare to cringe in as corporate leaders spout a lot of phone stuff that used to look bad enough when written down, but will sound even worse spoken.

G One good consequence of the change, however, will be a greater clarity in the way companies think about their businesses. The written word was a forgiving medium for over-complicated, ill-conceived messages. Video demands simplicity. The best companies will use this to their advantage by thinking through more rigorously what it is they are trying to say and do.