Embrace the uncertainty in making that tough decision.
Black and white thinking is easy, there is right and wrong, you decide which side of the fence you are on, and stick to it. Luckily, life is not like that. Life is a mass collision of colours, ambiguity built on ambiguity, built on uncertainty. That is what...
9 strategies for more impactful decisions
We are in a climate of uncertainty. The next twist in the Corona pandemic, war in Europe, confrontation with China, and the daily scrambling at all levels of government, stacked onto the usual challenges of making decisions in a business, all make the current...
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....