Leadership
The offer is 6× EBITDA. The buyer is multiplying a different number.
Most of the value in a sale is won or lost in the earnings figure the multiple attaches to, long before anyone argues about the multiple itself.
Rialto Bridge
Leadership
Articles on leadership.
Leadership
The dashboard refreshes every hour. The decision it feeds is made once a year.
Most reporting problems aren't about choosing the wrong metrics: they're about numbers moving at a different speed from the decisions…
Leadership
Eleven people report to you. Three of them get managed.
Most owners can hold the meetings. The harder question is which of their people last had a conversation about their…
Leadership
The best estimator became operations manager. Both jobs got worse.
Promoting your strongest technical performer into management is the most common way a business loses two good jobs at once,…
Leadership
Every decision waits for Thursday. The average one waits five days.
Weekly decision meetings feel disciplined. The arithmetic of what happens between them is rarely examined, and it is usually worse…
Leadership
You took a fortnight off and nothing broke. Every call still came to your mobile.
The holiday where nothing goes wrong is the most reassuring test an owner can run, and the least informative one…
Leadership
The risk register has thirty entries. Two of them can end the business.
Most risk registers rank threats by how likely they are. That is the wrong axis when one entry is survivable…
Leadership
The decision took ten minutes. It waited three weeks for the room.
Most of the delay inside a growing business isn't caused by hard decisions: it's caused by easy ones queueing behind…
Leadership
Three people could stop it. One person could start it.
Nobody opposed the proposal. It still took nine weeks, and the structure that caused the delay appears in none of…
Leadership
The metric is reviewed monthly. It can only say something true once a quarter.
Most management reports are read at the cadence of the calendar rather than the cadence of the underlying process, and…
Take it further
This is the general pattern. Your business is the specific case.
Everything here is free to read with an account, and always will be. What it cannot do is tell you which of these applies to your numbers, your market and your constraints. That is the work we do with clients.