The Art Behind the Business

Say you have launched a new business area and even planned ahead what you needed to get done across the business, who your new customers would be, where you were going to get revenues from, how you were going to acquire customers, how you would market yourself, how you would produce the goods needed. One day you wake up and something is not quite right. You still have not paid off the initial investment and it feels like this new business area is eating into your (slim) core business profitability. You thought you were investing for growth where it seems like you are getting yourself in a hole. But it is not a deep hole, and you can't quite figure out what is going on. You sit at your desk and ask, what is wrong, what did I miss. If you had no goals on paper, nothing to guide you, how do you know if you are executing to plan, how do you know if the plan is even working. Nothing tells you that your business idea is wrong, but potentially, you may just be going about it the ...

It is one of those stories that the old days come back to haunt you. I started my career as a Banker and am no stranger to due diligence lists. I have been both on the receiving end and in the creative end of those. I have created data rooms to respond, massive excel spreadsheets, and have trolled through data rooms to find more information. I have mention this before, I am always data hungry. For those paying attention you might ask - but aren't you done with your banking years and off due diligence lists? Well, not really. First, I was never entirely out of due diligence. In fact, I apply due diligence as a modus operandi for challenging the status quo. I just start looking at the numbers, and then ask question #1, which inevitably leads to #2 and is inevitably linked to #3. It does not take a form of an excel spreadsheet and I don't get answers back via data rooms, but the concept is constant - a truly inquisitive nature with the purpose of understand and evalua...

I a bit of a data freak. I like my data, preferably correct. I feel like James Bond as he approaches the bar. How do you like your data? "Accurate, not Cut". That would be me. I don't take it re-worked, re-cut or in extracts. I take it raw so I know what it is, what it means, what it tells me, what flaws it has. The problem with data is that people more often than not do not understand what they are looking at. You asked for a piece of analysis and someone sends you a chart and you take it as it is. You believe you have done the right question and the person has interpreted what you were after the write way, extracted what you intended. A whole bunch of assumptions which my time working inside an organization (other than in the client facing side of the business) has taught me are mostly flawed. When we start looking at a problem, most likely we don't really know what we are after. We feel that there is some data that illustrates our story but really ...