Seeking Growth

Mark Leslie Talk "How I made 44 quarters"

Kennet recently had the benefit of hearing Mark Leslie speak at a private dinner to approximately 20 CEOs of bootstrapped technology companies in Silicon Valley. (See Return Leader: Mark Leslie for his story)

The talk “How I made 44 quarters" is on the surface a discussion of the merits of consistently hitting your numbers, but HOW Mark achieved his success was insightful, thought provoking and quite motivational. Attached is the presentation and a few key takeaways.

Team Development

Key Takeaways from Kennet Partners’ Dinner Panel on High Growth companies

The following story is part 1 of a 2 part series on a panel Kennet Partners held for high growth companies. 

What do great high growth private companies have in common?  My partners and I hosted a conference for high growth companies and executives last month around the INC 500 event in National Harbor, Maryland to discuss this topic in detail.   Our motivation for the panel topic came from a book called “The Breakthrough Company” by Keith McFarland (review here) that explores this topic in detail – think “Good to Great” for companies going from $5M to $250M.  McFarland’s book covers several themes relating to growth: shifting goals from the founder’s success to that of the company; investing in new markets and approaches (including how and when to do that); and making the transition from being nimble to competing with scalable advantages.  In the spirit of the book, we invited a great group of capital-efficient founders to discuss some of the books major themes and their personal experiences.  The panel speakers, listed below, all led fast growth capital-efficient companies that achieved high value outcomes.  

Crossroads: Should I Sell or Should I Grow?

Deciding when to sell shares, raise capital or sell your company

Entrepreneurs regularly ask me when the right time is to raise capital or sell shares. Having worked on hundreds of high-growth M&A deals and portfolio investments, I developed a model to help bootstrapped entrepreneurs think through the question of timing with regard to their own situation. I recently gave a talk for UBS’s wealth management group and put these thoughts into a presentation. I will share a few highlights in this blog post along with several key slides. If after reviewing this you are interested in seeing the full presentation, please click here.

Drive

Author: Daniel Pink

Who should read it: Entrepreneurs, Managers, Parents,

This review was first posted at VentureBeat's Entrepreneur Corner

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Successful entrepreneurs know that bringing their ideas to the most powerful reality is a function of building a team of the right caliber and with the right motivation.  

Drive proposes a new model to develop that motivation and deliver far more than you can with purely monetary rewards.   Daniel Pink argues that business is in the midst of a transformation, from a monetary-focused compensation model (Motivation 2.0) to one that relies on more intrinsic motivation (Motivation 3.0).  Success unlocks exponentially improved performance – and organizations whose leaders and employees have tremendous drive are capable of amazing results.

If you doubt that we are in a non-monetary business revolution (and you should be skeptical – it’s different from what we learned), stop and consider which of the following two business plans you would have bet on succeeding in 1995:

The New Strategic Selling

Authors : Robert B. Miller and Stephen E. Heiman

Who should read it: CEOs, Company Founders, Entrepreneurs, VP Sales, Sales Execs

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The single best book on sales I have ever read, it lays out a process that for sales management is intelligent, customer solution focused, and analytical. I have employed these principals personally and have had one of my companies standardize on the methodology.  It is highly effective in developing a common language for prospects, resource allocation, marketing investments and growth expectations.

If you are sales oriented and know Miller/Heiman you may find some of my applications below of interest.  The real benefit is not sales process but sales management improvement and the ability to get to key decision makers effectively.  If you have a non-sales background, this book is critical since it will give you a punch list of questions to ask your sales managers to gauge the quality of a pipeline. It will also help you understand the resources you need to provide to help get to the economic buyers in your customer base.  Just like you innovated your product, you need to innovate how to get people to listen and provide solid feedback on their needs, be it through purchases or by vocalizing unaddressed pain points.

The Global Achievement Gap

Author: Tony Wagner

Who should read it: educators, parents and commercial/social entrepreneurs

 This is an excellent book on the challenges and potential solutions in today’s education system. Tony Wagner sees a major gap between what students are being taught, and the skills they need to master to succeed in the 21st century economy. 

Unlike many that complain about the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, he favors testing, but believes that it should be about ability to acquire critical skills needed by the market place, not just recalling content.   His diagnosis is that the primary challenge facing education is in the way educators manage themselves: where, unlike other professions there is little peer review.  Without a way for teachers to assess themselves, they will be challenged to improve their practice and student outcomes. 

He also recognizes that to motivate students in today’s digital media environment we need to change how we teach them – with more media, interactivity, peer interaction, rapid metric-based feedback, real world projects and success coaching.   There is massive technology-based innovation disrupting the Education sector, and that will create significant opportunities for social and commercial entrepreneurs offering solutions that cost-effectively improve results.  This book highlights several social entrepreneurs doing exactly that: improving results while also teaching success skills most schools don’t address. His insights are enlightening for educators, parents and commercial/social entrepreneurs seeking opportunities to improve education. 

Guns Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Author: Jared Diamond

Who should read it: CEOs, Founders, Managers and Entrepreneurs

  This is a ‘must read’ for entrepreneurs - one of the best reads in the last few decades. It is all about innovation; not just in technology but in other major areas that impacted the development of societies: farming, writing, and politics.  The book explains why it is that the Spaniards conquered the Incas instead of vice versa.  Sure, the Spaniards had the ships and the guns but how is it that they got them first? The question is historic but still relevant; what is it that determines which society wins when they come into conflict? In answering that, the author helps us understand the current distribution of wealth, power and influence among states. It also sheds light on the connection between the pace of innovation and the scale and level of interactions between societies. Not bad for 400 pages!

Jared Diamond is worth listening to. His background is unique: he has training in evolutionary biology, and biogeography, and is a linguist.  He has studied hundreds of societies in South America, Africa, Indonesia, Australia and New Guinea and has developed a model for how those societies evolved as well as the geographic forces that supported them.  He makes his historical detective work interesting: not unlike a CSI episode, explaining why the conclusions are the only logical answer.   The book won a Pulitizer Prize and is recommended widely:  McKinsey Global Research, for example, bought copies for all their partners (smart guys!) because of its valuable insights.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Author: Stephen R. Covey

Who should read it: CEOs, Company Founders, Entrepreneurs, Managers  

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  This is a ‘classic’ for entrepreneurs and executives.  First published 1989, it has become a cornerstone book on how to achieve success and make your visions reality.  In it, Steven Covey discusses how to set your goals, how to manage your time and resources against them, and how to align with others so that you achieve success.   If you are new to the book, it is a ‘must read’. To the many of you who have already read it, I trust that my experience on how to apply it will be useful.

I regard this as one of the top three reads (the other two to be reviewed soon – stay tuned). Of the three, this is THE book to read on developing a game plan for accomplishing what you want in life.  If there is one book you should recommend to that graduating student (MBA, college, high school) who looks to you for advice, and to your executive team – this is it. 

 The biggest challenge with this book is that there is so much in it that readers often have to put it down before it is finished, so they can ‘process’ what it says. When I first read it, I had to stop half way through. I have now read it three times and strongly recommend that you persevere too, since every chapter is rich with powerful advice.