Owner Transition

I'm 51, so I figure I'd better get this right pretty soon. :) I think about this a lot, though. The common thread through the last 25 years, though, is that I've worked for myself. That's a lot of years without a safety net, and it's also a lot of years to learn habits that would make it almost impossible for me to work for someone else.

About 20 years ago, though, I put together this list. At the time, I felt like most of my life was ahead of me and that I wanted as many options as possible. So there's very different from each other, and it was just me dreaming one day:

The reason marketing firms fail is not creativity, location, or the marketplace. It’s management ability. Your firm is a direct reflection of you, and you must take responsibility for it. Here are the most common dozen mistakes we see marketing firms make. If you are managing a firm now, you’ll identify immediately. If you are an employee, this might give you some context for the decisions you may not agree with. If you are considering starting a company, this will help you learn from the mistakes of others.

Some decisions are simple and insignificant, like deciding where your desk should be in the big corner office. Others are difficult, but less significant, like what title to give your “new business” person. Others are watershed decisions because they have far reaching implications.

The notion to write about this comes from the fact that there’s been more merger/acquisition (M/A) activity in this field recently than I’ve ever seen in any six-month period. What’s especially notable is that it’s occurring in a difficult economic climate.

For background, over the last 15+ years I’ve been the lead advisor on nearly 150 transactions, crafting 700+ valuations in the process. (If you’d like to use the valuation formula in your buy/sell agreement, you are welcome to do so for free.)

Are you modelling your activities after the public companies in the news all the time? You might double check those business assumptions occasionally to be sure they are leading you in the right direction. We need to filter the steady messages that inform our actions to discard those that will take us in directions contrary to our own goals.

One example is the distinction between how publicly traded companies are run and how your privately held firm should be run. Not recognizing those differences can create heartache and confusion. Here are four assumptions you might want to avoid when emulating publicly traded companies.

After owning a marketing firm for six years and then advising other principals since 1994, one of the unsolved mysteries that still makes me scratch my head is why the vast majority of people in this field fade away from it in their late forties and early fifties. Not only is that unique in the professional services sector, but it’s also a darn waste because these people are smart, hardworking, and capable of having a significant impact on their employees, their clients, and even the world.

David C. Baker was named a "mentor" for the Entrepreneur Center. EC Mentors come from all backgrounds and types, however they all love helping innovative and driven entrepreneurs turn their ideas into reality. The EC Mentoring Program helps individuals apply their lifetime of business experience to helping startups launch successfully.

Valuable Content, Ltd., of Bristol, England awarded us their monthly "Valuable Content Award", which put us in very esteemed company, like David Meerman Scott, Ian Brodie, and Charles Green (of Trusted Advisors fame).

This article, written for Communication Arts, looks at the eight options most principals have for a transition, rating the likelihood of each.

The DBA in the UK commissioned an article on the 10 most common mistakes that could be hurting your business.