Field notes on the gap between how good you are and how much you make — pricing, positioning, distribution, unit economics, and the quiet business decisions that decide whether great work ever gets paid what it's worth. Every number here is traced to a named study, and the ones I could not trace are named as such.
For owners handing something over, and for the generation being handed it. What the research actually says about value, timing and what makes a handover survivable.
The lawyer structures the transfer, the tax adviser minimises it, the consultant improves the conversation about it. Nobody has been engaged to value the asset.
Read →The route is a calendar commitment before it is a preference. Which means a decision most owners think they are still holding open was closed for them by arithmetic some years ago.
Read →Every adviser in this market quotes 30/12/3 to establish urgency. It comes from one 1987 book about Illinois manufacturers, and the clearest correction was published by the author's own firm.
Read →A share purchase agreement records what was agreed. It does not test whether the business can survive it — and in a family transfer financed inside the family, no lender is there to ask.
Read →Sixty-three per cent of family businesses say they are not fully confident their next generation is ready. I think most of them are measuring the wrong thing.
Read →Switzerland is in the middle of the largest transfer of business ownership in its modern history, and most of the companies involved have no idea what they are worth.
Read →Ask the incoming generation what they want to do differently and the answers are strikingly commercial. Ask the outgoing one what they fear, and the answers are cultural.
Read →Thirteen per cent of family businesses currently appoint an external CEO. After the next handover, the projection is twenty-six. It is worth understanding why before it happens to you.
Read →Family firms are built to endure — and that same protective instinct quietly caps what they earn. The next generation is where that changes, or doesn't.
Read →Margin, pricing, customer concentration and what a business is really worth. The questions an accountant is not asked to answer.
Four causes, and they call for opposite responses. Which is why guessing between them is the expensive part.
Read →Everyone answers this with a threshold. The research answers it with a discount rate, and that rate is being applied to you already.
Read →Part of the gap between what you expected and what you were offered is arithmetic you cannot argue with. A larger part than most owners think is work.
Read →The number you are looking for does not exist, because it was never one number. It is a different number for every segment of your base, and the segments paying most are rarely the ones you would guess.
Read →You can have 600,000 followers and a bank balance that reflects none of them. Why big audiences fail to convert — and why it's almost never a content problem.
Read →Struggling founders spread themselves across every channel. Growing ones pick one, make it work, and only then earn the right to add a second.
Read →Most founders can quote their revenue and nothing else. Four numbers actually tell you whether the business works — and most people can't name three of them.
Read →A business that depends on you is a job with extra steps. Here's what turns it into an asset — whether or not you ever plan to sell.
Read →Trying to be the best in a crowded category is an expensive, endless fight. Being the only one who does what you do is a different game entirely.
Read →For people who are excellent at the work and less well served by the business around it. Utilisation, rates, capacity and the arithmetic behind all three.
Four multiplicative terms sit between your working day and your bank account. Most people only ever adjust the fifth one, which is the price, and it is usually not the one that is broken.
Read →The fear is unbounded and the actual number is small. There is a formula for exactly how many clients a price rise can afford to cost you, and almost nobody has run it on their own book.
Read →Nobody can tell you your rate is too low without knowing what it is too low against. Three numbers supply the comparison, and most people have computed exactly one of them.
Read →One person cannot sell and deliver in the same hour. The oscillation that follows is not a character flaw — it has a size, and the Swiss survival data puts a number on it.
Read →Specialisation is not a marketing decision. It is a decision about how many people the buyer can call instead of you, and that is the only thing that lets you charge more without working more.
Read →The most common reason brilliant people underearn has nothing to do with their talent — and everything to do with the commercial infrastructure nobody built around them.
Read →The most common pricing mistake brilliant experts make isn't charging too little. It's pricing from the wrong place entirely.
Read →The very thing that made you successful — being exceptional at your craft — is usually the thing quietly capping your growth. There's a name for it.
Read →The commercial version of a conversation usually held in psychological terms. Evidence first, and the honest version of it.
An employee's number was written by somebody else. A self-employed woman's number was written by her. The second gap is the larger one, and the reason is not the one usually given.
Read →Women rated their own performance lower even after being shown exactly how they had done. That is usually read as proof of a confidence problem. It is closer to proof that confidence is not the variable.
Read →If the failure rate is identical and the revenue is not, the deficit is not in how the business is run. It is in what gets sold, to whom, at what price, through what channel, financed how.
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