Monthly Archives: June 2009

Your Firm’s Financial Health

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Anita Campbell, over at Small Business Trends, posted some very useful advice about taking the financial temperature of your small business.

But managing your business for financial health is about taking a big picture view of your business, as interpreted through the detail of your financial statements.

It’s the small business, financial interpretation of think global, act local.

Having previously run due diligence numbers on small companies during M&A opportunities, I can’t stress how important it is to “normalize” your financial picture. You can easily and quickly get lost when looking through rows and columns full of numbers for hours in trying to interpret your financial health.

Using ratios not only gives you a quick review of your financial health, but comparing them against industry averages certainly helps give you a great idea as to where you stand against your competitors / with your peers.

Best Kept Marketing Secrets

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A great compilation from a lot of great sources. Reading through the PDF, this one stands out for me (via John Battelle)…

The best kept secret in marketing is to invest your time in eliciting and responding to your customer’s feedback, even if it’s negative . It’s the secret to building a network of evangelists who keep on giving back to your business.

Why is this such a secret? Not a lot of folks put effort into talking with folks who have negative feedback, or at least, give off a negative impression. Our initial reaction is to hide, maybe even bury the feedback so other customers/competitors/employees don’t see it. We can find out a lot about our products/services/marketing from these folks.

Maybe it’s just a misunderstanding, or maybe something even more sinister. Either way, they are letting you know, which others might have dismissed. In other words, they are willing to contact you, and express their thoughts. Isn’t this the beginning of a conversation?

Isn’t that what most marketing professionals aim for?

The MBA Oath – It’s About Time

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I like listening to The Economist.com’s podcast – it gives a different flavor to international and domestic news than we get here. I’ll usually listen to a handful at the same time, normally on a Sunday morning.

This round, I was excited to see an episode entitled “A Hippocratic oath for MBAs“. The opening monologue is paraphrased below:

…When you see a placard on the wall in a doctor’s office, it reassures you. You don’t get the same feeling when you walk into a business office…

I can certainly see why this is true in today’s wacky economic and business climates – business folks are in the wrong no matter where you turn. But what if these folks had to answer to a higher standard, both professionally and ethically?

I like the idea of an MBA oath. It’s in its early stages of development, and there is much work to be done. I remember taking courses during my CFA studies, and a big part of it was agreeing to the principles and standards of being a charterholder. No matter where you went in the world, the CFA designation meant something – it held value.

I’d like to see this happen with the MBA programs from different schools, even if it’s something that starts off small and grows as other programs invest and join. And it makes sense that the founders of this movement are coming from Harvard Business School, since most MBA case studies used in different programs are derived from HBS courses.

It looks like NPR recently posted an article with an accompanying audio podcast. Along with The Economist.com’s recent article, let’s hope this ethical movement continues to pick up steam.