Moneyball and the Flow-Through Entity Seller
For those who haven’t read the book or seen the movie, Moneyball is a story of a baseball team seeking to compete by finding and exploiting market distortions in the valuation of players. Specifically, players producing high on-base percentages were ...
An Interview with SharePoint Consultancy CEO Mike Steadman
As I’ve written elsewhere in Above the Clouds, focus is critical to successfully building enterprise value, particularly among small-to-mid-sized consulting firms. Many firms choose to focus on a particular technology horizontal, vendor or vendor product. A much smaller number choose ...
Review of Gartner’s “How Cloud Sourcing is Changing the IT Services Market” Webinar
It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that the topic of the Cloud has received its fair share of attention of late. The word “Cloud” has been the most searched term on Gartner’s website for both ...
Vertical Focus Pays Off for Headstrong
Last month, I wrote about the importance of services offering focus for optimizing enterprise value for technology consultancies. Today saw a great example of the power of this concept, with the announcement that offshore BPO firm Genpact (NYSE: ...
Employee Retention Strategies & Best Practices
A number of my recent Tweets have touched on spikes in hiring activity and voluntary employee attrition levels among technology consultancies. I see substantial anecdotal evidence of these trends in my chats with CEOs and the drivers are clear: A markedly ...
If You Chase Two Rabbits, Both Will Escape
This post forced itself upon me repeatedly during many late nights banging away at the keyboard (is there an equivalent phrase for the world of tablets/touch screens? Somehow, “touching and swiping the screen” doesn’t have the same effect) categorizing ...
The Most Important Business Quality Metric for Evaluating Consultancies
I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time evaluating technology consulting businesses over the last 20 years and doing so involves examining a large number of qualitative and quantitative factors. These include things such as revenue, revenue growth rate, client ...
Enterprise Value vs. Equity Value: A Confusing Topic for Many Consultancy Owners
One of the topics I will return to often on these virtual pages is that of how consultancies can increase enterprise value. But before starting down that road, I should clear up a common source of confusion by explaining ...
An Interview with Cloud Consultancy CEO Jon Hallett
One of the interesting topics for technology consultancies over the next few years will be how best to navigate operationally as cloud computing continues to take hold. The move to the cloud has ramifications in numerous areas, including evolving ...
Common Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make in Selling Their Businesses
Much of the attraction of wildly popular reality TV shows seems to be the drama of watching spectacular failure. Whether it be Donald Trump barking “You’re fired” at a would-be apprentice or judges heaping insults on hapless singing contestants, viewers ...
