Ian Smith | The Portfolio Partnership

Always Be Grooming For Sale!

by Ian Smith | Mar 13, 2017 | Grooming For Sale

Let’s assume you are running a business with between 2 and 499 employees. You represent 99.69% of American based firms! There are only 18,000 firms employing 500 employees or more. But these larger firms are important, they employ just over 50% of America....

How To Get Better at Strategic Planning – Part 2

by Ian Smith | Mar 6, 2017 | Strategy

As we discussed in Part 1, Strategic Planning is a practical process that produces a clear strategic vision for the business, generates a compelling positioning statement and therefore, in context, delivers an aligned set of operational actions to get you there. So...

How To Get Better at Strategic Planning – Part 1 Shareholder Objectives

by Ian Smith | Feb 20, 2017 | Strategy

First, a definition of Strategic Planning. It is a practical process that produces a clear strategic vision for the business, generates a compelling positioning statement and therefore, in context, delivers an aligned set of operational actions to get you there....

How To Get Better At Acquiring Companies

by Ian Smith | Feb 13, 2017 | Acquisitions

First let’s challenge the assumption – do we need to get better? Every piece of research ever done by PWC, Cass Business School or any scholarly research house points to failure. Most journalists summarize the research by saying that 80% of deals are a failure as...

Investing in a CRM System Will Fail

by Ian Smith | Feb 6, 2017 | Sales Management, Sales Process, Sales Tips

Investing in a CRM System will fail unless you teach your sales team a system for communicating with your prospects and customers. The system is really quite simple and it falls into three distinct buckets. 3 Big Buckets Product and Service Knowledge Customer, Markets...