You’ve been slogging along for 40 years and the cement floor bites harder every day. You are wondering if it is time to sell the company, but you have no idea what it is worth or if anybody would want it. I’ve been helping folks buy and sell machining businesses for quite a while. This blog is a primer on what to consider when selling and how to go about it. Why sell? Understand yourself and your situation. Are you being forced by illness, distraction, disinterest, or the allure of retirement? Is the business making money? This question is crucial,…
Author: Lloyd Graff
When Donald Trump announced his grandiose plan for trade tariffs on April 2, 2025 some people cringed, others cheered, and a few called their lawyers. One of those was Rick Woldenberg, the CEO of a family-owned company in Vernon Hills, Illinois a suburb of Chicago. His firm, Learning Resources, outsources the majority of the manufacturing of its products made of plastic to Chinese firms. My wife, Risa, is an educational therapist and we have some of their products in her home office. Woldenberg’s company was founded in 1984, but predecessor companies started by family members go back 100 years. Learning…
Today is my son Noah’s 46th birthday. My gift to him and to myself is to write a piece about him and my feelings for him. Noah is my youngest child. He has an older sister, Sarah, who is determined to be the best at everything she does, and usually accomplishes it. She was an “easy child”–class valedictorian and now a respected Rabbi in Silicon Valley. Ari, his older brother, had a somewhat troubled childhood and fought with Noah incessantly along the way. Today he is a gifted psychologist and extremely close with Noah and his wife Stephanie and their…
Remember your mother’s or grandmother’s silver service for 12 that she only used once or twice a year when the whole family showed up? Remember when nobody else in the family would take it when she passed away–because who had the space or the desire to show off fancy dishes or silverware. And what a pain they were to wash because you couldn’t just stick them in the dishwasher. Also they were so darn heavy. Then there was that big clunky wooden box they fit into. It did not deserve the space it took up. Ten years ago silver was…
Children, let me tell you a story. There once was a wonderful little cookie with a delicious white filling between two chocolatey layers. My mother used to bring them home from the A&P store where she shopped on 71st Street in Chicago. “Oreos!” we chimed. “No, they’re Hydrox,” she said. But they looked just like Oreos and tasted almost the same. But eventually the Hydrox disappeared. All gone. Eaten by Oreos and their big Daddy, Mr. Nabisco. *** Hydrox is a story of American capitalism. The originator, the inventor, the first “out of the box,” lost the battle. We may…
The Denver Broncos have one of the best records in the National Football League. They also have the second highest number of punts, which is what you do when you don’t make a first down and need to improve your field position. Sounds weird, but I was reminded of it by my It’s a Wonderful Business column of 12 years ago. I am becoming more accepting of aches and pains and setbacks than when I wrote that piece back then. Life isn’t easy. There are failures and in many cases you just have to punt. It’s no sin. Life is…
Fernando Mendoza is an odd name for a Heisman Trophy candidate college quarterback, much less one from Number One ranked Indiana, which hadn’t won the Big Ten for 58 years until last Saturday. Fernando ended up in Bloomington via Miami and Berkeley, California. His brother Alberto was already there, also as a quarterback, and helped Fernando learn the playbook and get acquainted with the other players. The Mendoza story is one of family and immigrant success. All four of Fernando’s grandparents came from Cuba after Fidel Castro took power in 1959 and installed a Communist regime allied with Russia under…
Is 2026 going to be a good time to invest in a business in light of what just happened in New York City’s mayoral race? Peter Thiel was the first outside investor in Facebook in 2004. His gain was over 4,000%. If anybody understands capitalism, it is a guy like Peter Thiel. He has observed capitalism becoming more and more out of favor with young people—the kind of folks who helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City two weeks ago. In 2020, Thiel wrote a prescient email to executives at Facebook predicting the coming rise in Socialism’s popularity…
John Fetterman, Senator from Pennsylvania, is 6’8”, bald, wears a Carhartt hoodie and long shorts around the Capitol. He looks like a beaten-up wrestler from the WWE. For a successful politician he appears and acts like a man from another planet. But after reading a powerful excerpt from his new book about himself, “Unfettered,” my view of him as an eccentric looking to build a national reputation, has changed radically. Fetterman, after getting an MBA and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard, volunteered for AmeriCorps and worked in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a declining steel town. In 2006, he ran for…
UPS, Amazon, and FedEx are all fully engaged in their annual employee purge. UPS says it is cutting 48,000 jobs in 2025–34,000 in management and 14,000 in operations. This might explain why Graff-Pinkert’s Wickman spare parts business was getting tariffed 200% on imports from England rather than the 10% rate we’re supposed to be getting. UPS doesn’t have the people to process the tariffs so they hit us first with 200% with a promise “one day” they will refund what we’re owed. Now we only use DHL for imports. One of the big reasons for UPS’s cuts is Amazon. They…