Resources
HBV White Papers
15 Quotes from Famous Entrepreneurs
Walt Disney, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, and Thomas Edison are just several of the successful entrepreneurs whose thoughts on Entrepreneurship are shared in this HBV white paper. Are you putting these words of wisdom from successful entrepreneurs into practice everyday in your own efforts? Read more…
25 Leading Ideas from Jack Welch
John Francis "Jack" Welch, Jr. (born November 19, 1935) is the former Chairman and CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001. Welch gained a solid reputation for uncanny business acumen and unique leadership strategies at GE. He remains a highly regarded figure in business circles due to his innovative management strategies and leadership style.
The following represent a compendium of ideas from many of Jack Welch’s books, articles, and presentations. Harbour Bridge Ventures utilizes these thoughts regularly in our work with entrepreneurs and management teams in our client companies. They are published here in list form for easy reference and reflection. While the expression of these thoughts here is in our own words, we give credit to Jack Welch for having first expressed them in his own. Read more…
Allocating Equity in Startup Companies
Building a business is not unlike constructing a building, except that the required materials aren't tangibles like bricks and mortar, but intangibles such as a great idea, strategy, execution and most importantly capital. However, with multiple founders showing up with varying contributions at different times, it's hard to know how to divide the ownership of the company. This is particularly difficult when the company is in its early startup or development phases. However, before outside capital is sought, the division of equity ownership amongst the founders is a matter than must be settled.
Fair and equitable allo0cation of equity ownership is a question frequently asked of Harbour Bridge Ventures. While leaving this question ultimately to be settled by the entrepreneurial founding team, we have always suggested that a winning business partnership is built on compromise and fairness. But to split up equity fairly, all founders must agree on exactly what "fair" is. The option we most often suggest is for founders to think like investors when determining the value of their contributions, even if they have no plans to raise funds. Read more…
Boosting Sales Performance
Are you satisfied with the performance of your sales team? Do you understand the causes and effects behind both sales successes and failures? Do all members of your sales team consistently perform at the same level? If not, do you understand what accounts for the variability in performance? Are you able to accurately forecast sales?
If these and other similar questions trouble you, you are not alone. Business owners, senior executives, and marketing professionals all frequently lament shortfalls in sales performance but struggle to find effective approaches to improving top line revenues. Most, when questioned closely, admit to a lack of understanding about what accounts for variance in performance and difficulty in accurately forecasting sales. HBV explains how Process Improvement programs and Six Sigma disciplines long used by some of today’s most successful companies in Total Quality Management (TQM) programs can be equally effective to finding, gaining, and keeping customers in the drive to improve sales performance. Read more…
Smart-sourcing – Leveraging Your Operations for Maximum Benefit
Smart-sourcing is a set of strategies that focus on the conception and implementation of an optimal enterprise business process model that integrates all essential business processes to produce maximum value at the lowest possible cost for all stakeholders. No ‘single sourcing strategy’, regardless of the size or breadth of the enterprise, will produce optimal value for all stakeholders. A better approach is a Smart-sourcing strategy that recognizes those ‘Opportunity’ activities that produce competitive advantage and represent core competencies of the enterprise, as distinct from those ‘Risk’ activities that require sound execution to avoid competitive disadvantage but do not produce competitive distinction. Smart-sourcing strategies can then be implemented to focus on tighter ownership and control of the ‘Opportunity’ activities, while looking to support sound execution at the lowest possible cost of ‘Risk’ activities. Read more…
Successful Turnarounds
Surprisingly often, it seems management of a troubled company is late to acknowledge a problem exists let alone recognize their role in both contributing to the challenges and the eventual decline of the company resulting from ignoring a pending crisis until it is too late. The Association of Insolvency and Restructuring Advisors, recognized professionals in Turnaround Management, have identified the leading cause of business failure (52%) as “internally generated problems within management’s control.” An additional 24% of the causes are a balance of internal and external factors that, although not under management’s control, are the responsibility of management to identify and address. 15% of the causes are internal problems triggered by external factors such as changing economic or market conditions and regulatory changes.
The message for managers of these statistics is that in a vast majority of business crisis management was either partially to blame for the troubles or, at best, remains at fault for a failure to detect and react to changes in the company’s situation. Opportunity windows to turnaround a troubled company can quickly close when management ignores the early signs of trouble, misplaces blame, refuses to seek professional help, or procrastinates in taking necessary steps to address the problems. Read more…
What is Corporate Renewal?
Periods of economic and financial distress pose special challenges to the capabilities and decision-making processes of most management teams. Not only do such occurrences increase demands on existing managerial abilities, but they also create a whole new spectrum of legal, accounting, and financial considerations that impact the renewal process. Today’s increased competition, cyclical and volatile financial markets, and economic trends have created a climate in which no business can take stability for granted.
Corporate Renewal involves the formulation and implementation of a strategic plan and a set of actions for the turnaround and restructuring of a business, typically during times of severe corporate financial distress. Often this turnaround of the business requires the assistance of a turnaround professional with specific expertise and experience in the corporate renewal/turnaround profession. The chances of successfully navigating the corporate renewal process increases through the use of qualified turnaround professionals, who have the experience and expertise to apply sound practices of turnaround management to failing businesses. Read more…
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