Imagine how bad it must feel for a business owner or CEO to toil for years, only to have to accept a low price (or nothing) when they sell the business. It happens all too often. This article lays out seven essentials for a pleasurable exit. Mid-market CEOs under-invest in training themselves on how to prepare their firms for an exit.
Assessing the complexity of risk of different types of acquisitions is a critical mid-market CEO skill. My Forbes.com post this week explains the importance of being able to forecast the complexity of planned acquisitions, and gives insights about how to do so.
Mid-market acquisitions fail 50% of the time and even those that succeed face a rough ride. Here’s how to cut your risk by using a big-company practice.
For a mid-market company, choosing where to place your innovation bets is a dangerous game. Where you spend your time and invest your dollars are decisions that can make or break you. How much time should a CEO and his team invest in looking at “new ideas?” And how does a CEO select the most promising innovations and ignore the rest?
Facebook has just acquired Instagram – a billion dollar proposition. But what will happen to that acquisition? Will it truly be “integrated” into the Facebook business? If you’re a mid-market company, with limited resources both human and financial, what do you risk when making an acquisition?
One of the main reasons acquisitions fail is that they are doomed from the start. Some deals just shouldn’t be done. This Forbes article suggests five critical questions
Nearly every successful middle-market company eventually faces a swarm of competition. When their core business contracts, single-product companies can find themselves fighting for their lives. But the companies which plan highly-related diversifications before such downturns grow in good times and bad.
Change is a constant in business, but new modalities have upped the ante. Today’s CEO requires new skills and approaches to deal with these four new challenges.
What would you reveal about the future direction of your company or a specific employee? If big changes are in the wind – M&A, reduction in force, or outright sale – here are some specific suggestions on how the CEO and their top team should deal with disclosure.
Nothing is for sure with big, broad constituencies. The bigger the group, the more variation there will be in how people react to needed change. Jim Harrison, CEO of MLSListings Inc., shows us how the patient leader listens to everyone, never reacts impulsively, and works in the interest of building consensus.
Robert Sher is founding principal of CEO to CEO, a consulting firm of former chief executives that improves the leadership infrastructure of midsized companies seeking to accelerate their performance. He was chief executive of Bentley Publishing Group from 1984 to 2006 and steered the firm to become a leading player in its industry (decorative art publishing).