IanDSmith commented on the following stories on BizSugar
20 Reasons Why You Will Never Sell Your Business
"Heather There will always be conflicts of priorities. The small business must over service those initial customers to get things moving. However over time if you are going to scale, creating a safer, fast growing environment you need to drive new customer acquisition. Measuring customer dependency is essential. Ian"Small Business Advice: The Basics of Scaling Your Business
"Heather to emphasize the point, only yesterday I was in a lunch meeting with a successful consulting business with $3m in sales who wanted to scale to the next level. As I pointed out their business would be less risky not more risky at $6m sales with a better spread of customers and profit."Acquisitions – 10 Reasons Why They Fail
"Great points. Post acquisition integration thinking done early reveals the fit or lack of it. It reveals how you will operationally run the business, It reveals the best way to structure the deal. It even determines how you should approach due diligence. In other words a rigorous approach to integration is essential. The best examples from the big boys are Google, great approach Vs HP perhaps not so rigorous. "When the CEO Burns Out – (or how to fix it before it happens)
"Heather Great point. The affordability issue is absolutely right. Bringing on a full time COO is not often not practical. However we fulfill this role for the “cost of a graduate” working on the key agenda items one day per week. And also by reorganizing how the existing talent is deployed we achieve much greater alignment and momentum for the business. Scaling a private company requires constant hard work on the right stuff with the right structures at the right time. Surprisingly raising large sums of money to scale businesses often fails because of the lack of know-how. So it’s about working smarter, defining tasks better, allocating resources more efficiently. Burn out symptoms appear when bosses fail to follow these little rules. Of course no one told them what the rules were. It sounds harsh but too many small company bosses confuse activity with effectiveness."Subscribe
The 6 Month Review
"Thanks - Thought it was timely"