SEMINARS (5 credit hours)

1. Packaging the Company

As a successful business broker, you must present the company as professionally as possible. While the format of the marketing materials will vary from firm to firm, and from assignment to assignment, the overall objective must be to present the information that will be most useful to prospective purchasers. This seminar is designed to give you useful tips and tricks to make your marketing materials stand out from the crowd and motivate buyers to look further at your listing. The seminar is designed to be interactive and seek the views and comments from the participants.

2. Legal Issues

As the sale of a business becomes formalized, many legal documents are created. The goal of this seminar is to make the participants aware of the issues and pitfalls that can creep into business sales and how to avoid these. Business brokers are not expected to, and should never give legal advice, but it is important for the broker to be aware of many of the issues that could arise as the transaction is being completed and to have some idea what it actually is that a transaction lawyer does

This seminar has been written by and will be presented by a lawyer who now practices mid-market brokerage.

3. Women in Business

The better you understand the client and the customer, the likelihood of obtaining and closing transactions improves. Women are increasingly becoming a larger segment of the buying and selling population. This seminar is designed to help sensitize the participants to the issues that may be gender specific and therefore important to understand.

Developed and taught by a successful female business broker, this seminar has been very well received at several IBBA conferences.

4. Cloud Applications

As technology develops and as we enter the world of “virtual offices”, we now have the ability to operate our business with all of our files and data stored electronically and hosted on servers “in the clouds”. Accessible from any computer, anytime, Cloud Computing offers the business brokerage industry many potential benefits. This seminar seeks to introduce the hows and whys of cloud applications and show you how these tools can make you more productive.

5. Private Equity in Canada

Is Private Equity in Canada different than in the USA? Who are the dominate players and what industries do they focus on? In a geographically diverse but scarcely populated country such as Canada, does Private Equity face unique challenges? What is the most effective and efficient means for Canadian business brokers to work with Private Equity firms?

This course was prepared by and presented by a business broker and a member of a Private Equity firm.

6. Selling Restaurants

There are more restaurants in Canada than any other single type of business. However, selling restaurants is very difficult. With a low cost of entry, questionable profitability, and issues of continuity without the current owners, the sale of restaurants requires skills and approaches generally not utilized by most business brokers.

This seminar was prepared with the assistance of brokers with many years of successful sales of restaurants.

7. Valuation – From 10,000 Feet

Understanding what creates value in privately held businesses is an important element of being a successful business broker. While IBBA offers a comprehensive 2-day course dealing specifically with this topic, this seminar is designed to explain the generalities of valuation “from 10,000 feet”. The concepts and principals of valuation will be discussed as well as some of the issues that complicate the process.

This seminar was created through a collaboration of various seasoned business brokers.

8. Deal Den

Anticipated to be the highlight of the seminars, the Deal Den will bring together three “well seasoned” business brokers and will allow them to share experiences of good and bad experiences. The format will allow participants to briefly seek the advice and opinions from brokers who have “seem it all”.

The Deal Den will be the final seminar of the conference and while scheduled for the standard 90 minutes, participant may not want to book flights too soon after the event is scheduled to end.