Every entrepreneur exits. It’s one of the few absolute certainties in business. Assuming you’ve built a viable company, you can choose when and how you exit, but you can’t choose whether. It’s going to happen. You can count on it.

Thinking of attendingthe Gathering of Games Conference in September? Great! It promises to be a great one, as this year’s theme is “Harnessing the Wisdom of the Crowd.” Let’s see what else you have to look forward to at this year’s conference:

We’ve seen countless articles on why managers and business leaders need to focus on engaging employees–not only is it generally an important predictor of company performance–but it leads to stronger communication, higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, and increased productivity and profitability. These benefits are widely recognized in organizations running open-book management systems; they encourage higher levels of engagement by their very nature.

Think back to when you first opened your business or launched your company. All your hopes and dreams centered on having happy, returning, high-spending customers, right? Your first few customers offered you a great chance to learn how to interact with them to create a great customer experience. As your business grew, so did the amount of people buying from you, and with each new customer you earned, something else happened…you needed more employees! That’s when it all started to change. You learned just how much employee engagement matters, and the more people you hired, the more crucial that realization was to your businesses success.

Coming up on April 21-23, 2015, the Great Game of Business team will hit the road for Denver, Colorado, for the National Center for Employee Ownership’s annual Employee Ownership Conference. The NCEO Employee Ownership Conference is the premiere gathering on employee ownership, and the NCEO’s annual conference provides an ideal opportunity to learn, network and share knowledge with others in the employee ownership world.

“We need to sell more stuff!” “If only the sales team was on a plan, we would be hitting our profit numbers and making bonuses!” Do you ever hear this chatter in your company? When our bottom line profits are not up to par, we all have a tendency to first focus on the top line. When in reality, there are all kinds of opportunities internally to boost profits. In most companies, additional profits are slipping through the cracks every day.

A few years ago, one of my relatives who used to own a lawn-mowing business was telling me a story about how the crew members were perfectionists about the lawns. “After we’re done, we walk across the street into the adjoining neighbors’ yards, etc., to make sure we’ve done a great job trimming,” he said. Then, I said, “Why walk across the street? Can’t you tell when you’re trimming?” “No, way,” he said. “You can’t tell when you’re on it. It all looks good from that vantage point. You need a different perspective.”

Mid America Metals is a 29-year-old firm based in Forsyth, Missouri, that provides metal, stone, wood, and glass refinishing and restoration services to primarily Class A office buildings across the U.S. Business Challenges Even as the company has grown over the years, it became apparent to Dale Donat, who co-founded Mid America with his two brothers, that the members of his workforce – which are distributed all over the U.S. – were struggling with their own finances – which prompted him to turn to the system his neighbor, Jack Stack, helped start: the GGOB.

Van Belle Nursery is a commercial supplier of trees, plants, and shrubs based in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada. The company, which was founded in 1973, ships to a variety of retailers in western Canada as well as in the northern U.S. Business Challenges One of the biggest challenges that the nursery faces is finding a way to build a cohesive company culture for its 100 associates, most of whom are immigrants from companies like Mexico, Iraq, Sudan, Zimbabwe, China, Costa Rica, Peru, Mexico, and India, and even a few from Canada.

U.S. Tower Services helps wireless phone providers like T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, U.S. cellular and Verizon build, maintain, and upgrade their communication towers. After starting out in St. Louis in 2002, U.S. Tower has expanded across the country and now has offices in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Missoula, Montana – the hometown of the company’s founder, Chad Berg.