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...

The Portfolio Partnership Creates The Hub

by Ian Smith | Jan 30, 2017 | Scaling

I founded The Portfolio Partnership (TPP) in 2009 to help management fulfill their potential, to scale their business, safely, operationally aligned to their strategy, creating a predictable economic model. I’ve worked with amazing people, dedicated to improving the...

Merging Two Private Companies – Why, How and Benefits

by Ian Smith | Jan 23, 2017 | Acquisitions

It’s tough scaling a private company. Organic growth can take decades to achieve critical mass. Say you get to $5m in sales and you can produce a compound annual growth of 10%. It takes 10 years to get to $13m. Is $13m critical mass in an industry? Probably not,...

Building Businesses Buyers Love To Buy – Tip #2 – Get Noticed!

by Ian Smith | Jan 16, 2017 | Grooming For Sale

Every management team cares about being noticed. Being invisible is not safe. Informing the marketplace of your presence is clearly a primary objective, especially is this inbound lead generation world. But I’m talking about a higher calling than just lead...

Building Businesses Buyers Love to Buy – #5 Customer Dependency

by Ian Smith | Jan 9, 2017 | Scaling

Buyers hate dependency. Dependency on the owner, one product or one customer. The post acquisition risk is just too high. This post discusses the problem of relying on one or even a couple of customers and what you can do. Many years ago when I was advising an IT...

Building Businesses Buyers Love to Buy – #9 Owner Dependency

by Ian Smith | Dec 29, 2016 | Scaling

Buyers hate dependency, especially if the business revolves around one person. Of course it’s a risky strategy for the health of the business, whether you ever attempt to sell your business or not. So how do we dilute the dependency the business has on one...