I was chatting with a few folk the other day about different styles that CEO’s have. Some wander around and chat, some roll up their sleeves and get deep into the hot issues, some just look at the numbers from their desk, while others cant help but micro manage.
This got me to thinking, can a CEO really manage a business from his / her desk or do they really need to get out amongst the people?
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For much of the last 2 weeks i have been looking at business plans – lots of them. Each and every day i am approach by someone with a new idea. They are all wanting funding, all are claiming to have something special, and all truly believe they will be massive in a few short years.
The question for me is how do you find the real nuggets of gold amongst all the noise?
A couple of days ago i attended the Angel Connect conference in Hobart, Tasmania as one of the speakers. The conference looked at everything from what makes a good idea through to raising money, closing the deal and working with Angels and VCs.
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Economic conditions aroun the world are tough. The question is now what is the likely impact on small businesses and more importantly those start ups that are reliant on funding to maintain their growth.
To answer this question, I came across a presentation from Sequoia Capita on startups and the economic downturn.
Here are the key messages:
- The recovery will be long – dont expect a quick turn around
- There are new realities – raising money on high speculative valuations is a thing of the past and series B and C funding will be very very tough
- Customer take up of businesses will be slower than projected
- Expense cuts are a must
- You have to become cash flow positive
The presentation then goes on to talk about specific actions businesses should take.
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Over the last month i have been writing a series of articles on how the REA Group went global. To date these articles have covered organic entry to new markets, acquisition based entry into Europe, Asia and the Middle East, how we structured ourselves to lead a global business and how we used internal consultants. This article looks at once we acquired a new business, how we integrated that business into the REA Group.
Integration planning started long before an acquisition was completed. During the due diligence process, we would look at the business we were acquiring and then systematically work out what level of integraton we would need in the businesss and over what period of time would we need to execute the integration. Now when we thought about integration, we looked at the obvious things like finance, HR, systems and processes, products, marketing, and technology. We also looked at cultural integraton and how we can bring the acquired company into the Group as an equal member.
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You have to love the Nike slogan – it really does epitomise many things a business should do and often doesnt. How many times have you been frustrated by the speed of decision making within a business or the speed of response by a business to make something happen. Often decisions get bogged down in politics, lack of ownership, consensus building or just fear (of making a decision). I have often experienced this when dealing with external businesses (and sometimes internally too) where people seem to take forever to make what sometimes looks like a relatively easy decision.
I think that there is a different way to run a business and one the leads to faster decision making, more responsibility passed down through the ranks and the result is a place where people get on with it, take leadership for their actions and things happen!
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The Australian Anthill Magazine has just released the winners and finalists of its Cool Company Awards for 2008. These awards cover a number of areas including innoation, global growth, online business and the x-factor award. The great news is that 3 of the companies i am involved in, redbubble.com, 3eep.com and artshub.com.au all did extremely well with redbubble winning both the best online business and x-factor awards.
So who are these companies and what is my involvement with them?
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A reader has sent through the following question about raising money for NGO’s and charities. “I am involved in an organisation that is like an NGO, but the work we do is charitable, we give pro bono legal services to people on remand and who cannot afford bail, let alone a lawyer. We get lawyers to take up the jobs, but we need money to run the programme. How do i get people to see past the NGO tag and support us as they would a charity? People in this part view NGO’s as being hugely donor funded, but ours is a christian outfit that so far only gets support from one christian lawyers fraternity. How do we get other donors and members of the public interested in donating to our organisation?”
This question got me thinking. The reader does face an interesting problem and i think that approach to the problem is to think about it like a for profit business and to think about it in terms of what they would do if faced with a similar problem.
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Over the last little while i have written about how the REA Group expanded its business internationally in a series called Going Global. I have so far explored organic and acquisition based growth as well as the structure we put in place to manage a global Group. This posting looks at how we used an internal productivity team to help drive knowledge sharing across the Group and at the same time to operate as a hit team when issues arise.
The internal consulting team was called the GPT – Global Productivity Team and reported into the Corporate function. The team consisted of around 6 people who, in general, had long experience with the company and had earned their stripes through having operated in the field.
The types of roles we had were consumer marketing, agent sales and marketing (classified sales), developer and third party sales (display sales), and editorial skills.
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jetBlue Logo
Anyone who has travelled domestically in the United States knows just how bad the US airlines are. It doesnt seem to matter which one you fly one (Delta, United, America, and so on) the service is often delivered with a snarl, business class and first class seats make going to the theatre seem comfortable, the flights seem to be always delayed, the food is often inedible and you seem to pay extra for everything.
Therefore imagine my surprise when i ended up on a jetBlue flight today and it has got to be one of the best domestic flights i have taken anywhere in the world.
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The first two Going Global blog posts were around how the REA Group (realestate.com.au Ltd) oganically entered the New Zealand market and how we acquired new businesses to enter Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Having acquired the businesses, the next challenge for any CEO is how do you manage a global business in such a way that you encourage the local team grow as fast as possible while ensuring that the overall requirements of the of the company are met. In addition, as the overall growth of the REA Group was being fuelled and financed by the highly successful perforamnce of the Australian business, it was important to ensure that the ongoing growth and success of the Australian business was not impacted.
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