Creating Value Faster: A Playbook for Small to Mid-Sized Businesses in Mergers and Acquisitions

Mergers, acquisitions, and other corporate combinations can be a powerful way for Small to Mid-Sized (SMB) businesses to create more value and growth opportunities. The goal for many SMB’s is to double or even triple revenues on the way to returning many times their initial investments. However, despite these ambitious goals, many SMB’s fail to […]

Creating a Winning Investment Thesis: How to Find the Best Businesses to Acquire as an Acquisition Entrepreneur

As an acquisition entrepreneur, finding the right business to acquire can be a daunting task. With so many options to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start and what to look for. However, having a well-defined investment thesis can help you narrow down your options and find the businesses that are […]

When things get rocky, practice deliberate calm

In unusually difficult situations, a counterintuitive response to stress is what many leaders should aim for, say Jacqueline Brassey, McKinsey senior knowledge expert, and McKinsey senior partner Aaron De Smet as they talk about their new book, Deliberate Calm: How to Learn and Lead in a Volatile World (HarperCollins, November 2022), on The McKinsey Podcast […]

Risk, Return, and the High Wire Act: Navigating an Uncertain Business Landscape

“The received wisdom is that risk increases in the recessions and falls in the booms. In contrast, it may be more helpful to think of risk as increasing during upswings, as financial imbalances build up, and materializing in recessions.” – Andrew Crockett Everyone loves discussing returns, as they are tangible, boast-worthy, and indicative of one’s […]

A playbook for newly minted private equity portfolio-company CEOs

Via:  McKinsey & Company CEOs who helm companies owned by private equity (PE) firms face a leadership challenge unlike any other. They must master everything a great public- or private-company CEO does, all while operating at a higher metabolic rate. A newcomer to PE also faces the conundrum of having limited access to insight about […]

How Venture Capitalists Make Decisions

Over the past 30 years, venture capital has been a vital source of financing for high-growth start-ups. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Gilead Sciences, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Whole Foods, and countless other innovative companies owe their early success in part to the capital and coaching provided by VCs. Venture capital has become an essential driver of economic […]

You Don’t Have to Pivot in a Crisis

VIA HBR.org When Covid-19 burst upon the scene in early 2020, startup ventures faced dramatic shifts in markets and the importance of strategic agility became axiomatic: If you wanted your venture to survive, let alone thrive, pundits (including ourselves) almost universally advocated deep internal cuts accompanied by pivots to new markets and business models. As […]

From disrupted to disruptor: Reinventing your business by transforming the core

Via:  McKinsey & Company Companies must be open to radical reinvention to find new, significant, and sustainable sources of revenue. When Madonna burst onto the scene in the early 1980s, there was little reason to suspect that she’d have more than her allotted 15 minutes of fame. But in the three decades since her debut album, […]

How AI Will Change Strategy: A Thought Experiment

How will AI change strategy? That’s the single most common question the three of us are asked from corporate executives, and it’s not trivial to answer. AI is fundamentally a prediction technology. As advances in AI make prediction cheaper, economic theory dictates that we’ll use prediction more frequently and widely, and the value of complements to […]

A Short Guide to Strategy for Entrepreneurs

It sometimes appears that the traditional rules of business are being upended by today’s mega-trends of multisided platforms, big data, machine learning and AI, crowdsourcing, the internet of things (IoT), and more. These trends have transformed the world of business immeasurably. But they have certainly not repealed the timeless rules of strategy. Yet for too many entrepreneurs, […]