Acquiring a new business is a hectic experience. There are so many things you need to deal with that it can be challenging to keep track of everything. Learning the ins and outs of the business, hiring a general manager, looking for inefficiencies and technological solutions, and finding the bathroom are all things you need to worry about when you take over a company.

But before you can deal with any of that, you need to know how to communicate the company sale to your new employees.

We go through the best ways to make the announcement, and how to use it as an opportunity to identify important employees within the organization.

Many of the companies that our partners acquire are old school, brick and mortar home services businesses. The owners and employees use systems that tend to rely on pens and paper to exchange information.

These outdated systems can be great opportunities to introduce efficiencies into a company as you seek to grow the business, usually by replacing the old-fashioned systems with new technological approaches.

But you should approach any changes to a business with care and consideration for the people who work there. This article explores how to introduce technology to a non-tech business.

Don’t get us wrong, buying a company is a scary process. You’re about to spend a large sum of money on a company that you probably don’t know in an industry you may not be familiar with.  Despite that, buying a company should never be a gamble. With the right amount of research, due diligence, and attention to detail, you should feel confident laying down money for your new business. Knowing what questions to ask is a crucial aspect of being an Acquisition Entrepreneur. Many deals can seem great at face value, but once you dig a little deeper you …

For many business owners looking to sell their company, one of the first things they’ll do is contact a business broker. This is often the best way to sell a small business, but it is not the only option. There are some cases where it may be preferable to sell a business privately. Business brokers are equivalent to real estate agents in many respects. They sell properties for their clients and get a percentage of the sale price. Brokers will usually handle the marketing and paperwork of the sale, but those percentage fees can add up. Some small business brokers …

When your goal is to build a world-class investment fund and accelerator, it’s vital to have some sort of guiding strategy – a holistic system that drives your culture and informs your purpose. At Acquira, we’ve adopted the Flywheel method as our guiding strategy. Our Flywheel demonstrates how we're able to find the best partners and disqualify bad ones, while finding great deals and giving back to the communities that help our businesses succeed.

Last week we talked about how you can download an owner's brain to create an employee skills matrix. This week, we're going to explain how to upload that knowledge in order to create an effective training sequence for the business. By clearly defining the role of each individual within an organization, you're able to establish a career trajectory for your employees that creates incentives and objectives for everyone within the business.

One of the biggest challenges you will face when acquiring a new company is learning how the actual work is done and how capable each employee is at doing their job. The person most equipped to help with this is the seller, but they're not going to be around forever. Because of that, it's your job to figure out how to download their brain as quickly as possible. The best way to do that is by creating an Employee Skills Matrix. How a company is run may be a mystery when you first show up, but it doesn't have to be for long. A skills matrix is a framework that can be used to map and monitor employees’ skills and their individual levels. It's a powerful way to find shortcomings in a business and set goals.

Determining whether a company is truly healthy or not is the most important thing you can do before acquiring a business. Due diligence demands that we dig into the finances of any organization that we’re interested in buying. But there are certain important and intangible elements that won’t be revealed on a company’s balance sheet. For instance, using traditional metrics, it’s impossible to know whether a company’s employees are truly happy and fulfilled in their jobs. We’ve developed a framework to measure the less tangible aspects of a company’s operations. We call this framework the Three P’s: People, Process, and Purpose. You can read all about it in this article. This framework allows a buyer to determine whether a business is a good deal and provides a roadmap for taking a relatively successful business and turning it into a powerhouse.

If you’ve just acquired a business, life can seem especially stressful. Tasks will pile up as fires demand to be extinguished and you need to stay on top of everything. One way to mitigate the craziness associated with the early days of an acquisition is to effectively prioritize your time. Of course, determining which tasks to focus on each day can be its own source of stress. In this article, we explore how to use the Eisenhower Matrix to help organize your life and determine what tasks you need to concentrate on to be as successful as possible. (Here’s a hint: they’re often not the ones you expect!) The methods we describe here are crucial tools for any new business owner.

How do you organize your life? Are you able to point to your greatest successes and deepest failures and understand how they helped you get to where you are? In business, the flywheel concept was introduced by Jim Collins. It represents compounded investment of effort, where each step a business takes feeds directly into the next, which feeds into the next, until the cycle begins again, driving the business toward success. The flywheel concept has various applications in the business world, but it’s also a powerful tool for organizing our own personal lives. In this article, Acquira co-founder Hayden Miyamoto explains how to apply Collins’ lessons in a different way. He shows you how to make a personal flywheel that can help improve your life and the lives of those around you. The personal application of this concept actually helped in the creation of Acquira, by creating a method to provide capital, training, and systems to help people acquire businesses of their own.