Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
Beth Ewen,
Upsize:
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dev.divistack.com
by Beth Ewen
“OF ALL THE IDEAS I’ve heard here today, I think mine is the best,” said the long-ago boss after a mandatory day-long retreat involving all managers. With one sentence he killed the enthusiasm generated by hours of brainstorming, and torpedoed his chances of motivating his team to start something fresh.
No business owner reading Upsize would be guilty of uttering such a Dilbert-worthy statement, we’d all like to think. Isn’t that why entrepreneurs start their own companies, to get rid of the soul-killing corporate junk that stifles innovation? We’ll start our own businesses, stay open to new ideas, and outmaneuver our bigger rivals.
But too often those stifling statements creep into our small-business culture. We don’t have the resources to start something new. We can’t get credit because big banks are hording all the money. The government is regulating us so much we can’t make a move. We don’t know where the economy is going so we’ll just sit tight. This has always worked for our company in the past, and now is not a time to take risks.
Each statement may seem reasonable to the person who says it, but the people who hear it can only lose heart.
I’m not advocating for the opposite scenario, when the CEO utters blindly optimistic statements that ignore reality. For every group of employees disheartened by their boss’s negative excuses, there’s another group worried by their owner’s mindless cheer. We’ve all aspired to the holy grail of entrepreneurship-perseverance. But when yet another owner utters the phrase “never, ever, ever give up,” I know somebody somewhere is questioning the wisdom of continuing down a path to nowhere.
More effective is a more nuanced approach, which many of the CEOs featured in this month’s cover story express so well. One swears not by perseverance alone, but by “effective perseverance,” which means continuous evaluation of what’s working and what’s not, and the quick embrace of the former and the abandonment of the latter.
Another insists that his company “fail fast,” meaning staffers test and measure every new idea and right away drop those that don’t work, before they’ve spent much time or money on a fruitless project. There are far more ideas to test than time to develop them, he believes, so he advocates quickly directing resources to the ones that work.
New ideas, tested routinely, pursued relentlessly when they prove their worth. That sounds like a motivating formula for any enterprise.
