"I've seen people with your talent sell themselves out of business because they can't deliver or finance deals," says finance advisor John Armour. Around the table, heads nod. Division 9 eases its cash-flow woes by buying materials for big jobs with bank debt. Armour disapproves. --Fortune Small Business
I remember sitting there thinking it couldn't be true," Sands says. She was about to turn 55. "All the female relatives in my family have lived into their 90s. My goal was to make it to 100." She had recently launched a new ranching business and had aggressive plans for growth. But now Sands had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, with a cancerous lymph node in her neck and a bigger one near her stomach. --Fortune Small Business
The hardest part of succession planning is making the decision to sell the business, and pharmacist Leonard Edloe is no exception. “My father worked hard, and he had more obstacles and fewer resources than I did,” he says quietly. “Am I taking the easy way out?” On the other hand, he admits to being tired. He is thinking of the past year of slow reimbursement under Medicare Part D, mounting bank debt and long hours. “Yesterday I filled 224 prescriptions myself, and realized how burned out I am.” --Fortune Small Business
In the office above his spacious aircraft hangar in Warrenton, Virginia, Ken Hyde pulls on a pair of white cotton gloves and reaches reverently inside a plastic bag for a small piece of yellowed muslin. What Hyde has is a four-foot length from the left lower wing of the original Wright Flyer. Artifacts like this make Hyde's dream team of aircraft builders the one against which all others are being measured as they race to build reproduction Flyers for the Wright Brothers centennial celebrations. -- Smithsonian Air & Space
Russell Straub's high-end clients were straining his business with more and more demands. Was it time to go downmarket? --Inc.
The Wrights had gotten back in business in the nick of time, or so it seemed, for within the next few years a handful of North American aircraft builders would take to the air as well….Out of that group came the man over whom the Wright brothers would obsess until their deaths: Glenn Curtiss. --Forbes.com and American Heritage of Invention & Technology [cover]
Oxford's rise, fall, and renewal present a striking illustration of how easily even a high-flying business can be brought to its knees by computer ills, as well as an example of the sort of aggressive measures it takes to recover. --Forbes ASAP
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