Earnouts, payouts and pitfalls of SMEs engaging in M&A.
Covid has led to quite a bit of M&A activity amongst the difficulties of trading. I know several 'baby boomers' who have just packed up and left. A number have sold businesses they previously intended to continue for a while, and leave ongoing...
The importance of what we cannot measure
Psychology drives our behaviour, and yet we struggle miserably to forecast the impact it will have. Therefore, we cannot predict behaviour with any real accuracy, except with the benefit of hindsight, or across the average, assuming we ask the right questions....
The single biggest challenge in marketing analytics?
Almost every marketing so called guru, yours truly included, will bang on about calculating an ROI from your investment in marketing. Marketing like any other investment should seek a return, and there should be accountability for those numbers. Almost nobody...
A marketer’s explanation of EBITDA
EBITDA is one of those acronyms that often appears in the accounts and narrative supposed to explain the financial outcomes of an enterprise. The meaning is often unclear to those unfamiliar with accounting jargon. It stands for: Earnings Before Interest,...
How do we create an ecology of talent?
There must be some sort of magic in the water supplied to the Santa Clara valley, just outside San Francisco, originally famous for its orange groves. What started as a 'nick-name' for the area in the 70's, stuck, and we now know it as 'Silicon Valley'....
Culture becomes what you tolerate.
Building a culture of……. (insert your own word)iIs a bit of a cliché. I have seen it in many documents that purport to be describing the mission, purpose, and all the rest of a business. Often it becomes a melange of meaningless words that offer no sense of...
Where do you sit in the cycle of scale?
When you look over commercial history, there is a cycle in scale. A new industry emerges, then scales using the capital captured to build production and productivity, which in turn leads to scaled volumes, fed by sales and marketing dominance. At some point, a...
How would surfing help your business?
A former client has been providing engineering services to the fossil fuel industry for decades. Having breakfast with him a while ago, he expressed the view that the prospects for the industry in which his business competes, and thus his business are dismal....
When you are looking for a social media consultant……..
My inbox is filled every day by emails from random people assuring me that their secret social media strategy will see me as rich as Bezos. Some have my name and email address; most are more like; 'Hi there' and many now start with the 'Re: our...
Rethinking sales commissions
We understand that the behaviour we reward is the one we get. It is the way we train our pets. Many also tend to overweight commissions when we pay salespeople, rewarding a set of behaviours, some of which may not be what we want. Years ago, we learnt that paying...