Finance can give dentistry a good reputation but it also has its wonderful side. I am preparing a presentation for International Women's Day this week and could not resist sharing some of these quotes from people who raised the money to keep themselves going:
INSPIRATION

1) "If you can dream it, you can do it." 
-Walt Disney, founder of The Walt Disney Company
2) "Business opportunities are like buses, there's always another one coming." 
-Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Enterprises
3) “Capital isn't that important in business. Experience isn't that important. You can get both of these things. What is important is ideas.” 
-Harvey Firestone, founder of Firestone Tire & Rubber Co.
4) “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” 
-Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple and Pixar
5) “Find your passion… then it is no longer work!” 
-L.A. Reid, co-founder of LaFace Records

TAKING INITIATIVE
6) “I had to make my own living and my own opportunity! But I made it! Don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them!" 
-Madam C.J. Walker, creator of beauty products and the first female self-made millionaire 
7) “The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.”
-Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari & Chuck E. Cheese’s
8) “The key is to just get on the bike, and the key to getting on the bike… is to stop thinking about ‘there are a bunch of reasons I might fall off’ and just hop on and peddle the damned thing. You can pick up a map, a tire pump, and better footwear along the way.” 
-Dick Costolo, founder of Feedburner.com
9) “The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try.” 
-Debbi Fields, founder of Mrs. Fields Cookies

HARD WORK vs. LUCK
10) “Genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration.” 
-Thomas Edison, founder of General Electric (GE)
11) “I made a resolve then that I was going to amount to something if I could. And no hours, nor amount of labor, nor amount of money would deter me from giving the best that there was in me. And I have done that ever since, and I win by it. I know.” 
-Colonel Sanders, founder of KFC
12) “Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is.” 
-Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop
13) “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that something is too competitive. Once you subtract the people who don’t work very hard, or the people who aren’t as good as you, your competition shrinks dramatically.” 
-Maggie Mason, founder of Mighty Goods
14) “Life is really simple as far as I’m concerned. There is no luck, you work hard and study things intently. If you do that for long and hard enough you’re successful.” 
-Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, Inc.

PERSEVERANCE
15) "When you reach an obstacle, turn it into an opportunity. You have the choice. You can overcome and be a winner, or you can allow it to overcome you and be a loser. The choice is yours and yours alone. Refuse to throw in the towel. Go that extra mile that failures refuse to travel. It is far better to be exhausted from success than to be rested from failure." 
-Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics
16) “It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because all that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.” 
-Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, co-founder of Broadcast.com, founder of HDNet

GUIDING PRINICIPLES
17) “Entrepreneurs are risk takers, willing to roll the dice with their money or reputation on the line in support of an idea or enterprise. They willingly assume responsibility for the success or failure of a venture and are answerable for all its facets.” 
-Victor Kiam, owner of Remington Products
18) “The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning; to create a product or service to make the world a better place.” 
-Guy Kawasaki, venture capitalist, CEO of Garage Technology Ventures
19) “A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship.” 
-John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil
20) “An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he’ll quickly learn how to chew it.” 
-Roy Ash, co-founder of Litton Industries
21) “I've been blessed to find people who are smarter than I am, and they help me to execute the vision I have.” 
-Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam
22) “One of the unique things we small companies have over the big guys is the ability to establish personal relationships. Big companies really can't do that. You read about effective organizations, learning organizations, lean and mean organizations, but small companies can be virtuous. We as small companies can have virtue because we as small companies are basically the embodiment of one or two people, and people can have virtue, while organizations really can't." 
-Jim Koch, founder of Boston Beer Company
23) “Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you're generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make.” 
-Donald Trump, real estate developer
24) “High expectations are the key to everything.” 
-Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart

SATISFACTION
25) “I find that when you have a real interest in life and a curious life, that sleep is not the most important thing.” 
-Martha Stewart, founder of Omnimedia

 About Loewen and Partners: Since 2002, Loewen and Partners professional advisors have assisted more than 1,500 clients in launching and growing their businesses, and raising more than $1 billion in growth financing. 

• Need help with your business plan? 

• Looking to raise capital?

Speak with a finance expert today!

Jacoline Loewen can be reached at Loewen Partners.

If you want global market share, Wireless will give you clues

Resilient Strategy, more and more, must look at the wider ecosystem. There is no point pursuing services and products that require technology that is vanishing - music onto TDK cassette tapes, for example.
If you have a technology product, service or App, this presentation is a wonderfully detailed presentation showing you the market share of wireless: phones, Android, country uptake of each service provider and so much more.
It surprised me - RIM does not look very healthy...sad for Canada. Here is a snapshot of the wireless industry and it is a "cheat sheet" to the mobile space: industry ratings, trends and company overviews. .
See the presentation on Slideshare: Pegasus Strategies Wireless Overview 2012

How do you make sure your company is not like Kodak

Vegas and strategy off-sites may seem a quirky combination but it works to get your top team out of their comfort zone and having high level discussions about the forest, not just the trees.

I thought I would share one of the more interesting questions posed by Jonathan Burns at Strategy Cube, "How do you know your company is not like Kodak. The digital camera was around for so long, but they completely blew their position as a market leader in the camera market. How could they ignore digital cameras?"

RIM has a great deal of pain from their dismissal of Apple's new technologies. Yet, if you are not a shareholder, be kind. The problems of innovation, is not easy to explain. Why do leading firms like Kodak, and our dearly beloved RIM, stumble when confronting technology change? Most explanations either zero in on managerial, organizational, and cultural responses to technological change or focus on the ability of established firms to deal with radically new technology; doing the latter requires a very different set of skills from those that an established firm historically has developed. 

Both approaches, useful in explaining why some companies stumble in the face of technological change, are summarized below. There is a third theory of why good companies can fail, based upon the concept of a value network. In my humble opinion, the value network concept seems to have much greater power than the other two theories.

Here is a quick excerpt from Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma, explaining the disk drive industry.

ORGANIZATIONAL AND MANAGERIAL EXPLANATIONS OF FAILURE

One explanation for why good companies fail points to organizational impediments as the source of the problem. While many analyses of this type stop with such simple rationales as bureaucracy, complacency, or "risk-averse" culture, come remarkably insightful studies exist in this tradition. Henderson and Clark, for example, conclude that companies' organizational structures typically facilitate component-level innovations, because most product development organizations consist of subgroups that correspond to a product's components. Such systems work very well as long as the product's fundamental architecture does not require change. But, say the authors, when architectural technology change is required, this type of structure impedes innovations that require people and groups to communicate and work together in new ways.

This notion has considerable face validity. In one incident recounted in Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative, The Soul of a New Machine, Data General engineers developing a next-generation minicomputer intended to leapfrog the product position of Digital Equipment Corporation were allowed by a friend of one team member into his facility in the middle of the night to examine Digital's latest computer, which his company had just bought. When Tom West, Data General's project leader and a former long-time Digital employee, removed the cover of the DEC minicomputer and examined its structure, he say "Digital's organization chart in the design of the product."

Because an organization's structure and how its groups work together may have been established to facilitate the design of its dominant product, the direction of causality may ultimately reverse itself: The organization's structure and the way its groups learn to work together can then affect the way it can and cannot design new products.

CAPABILITIES AND RADICAL TECHNOLOGY AS AN EXPLANATION

In assessing blame for the failure of good companies, the distinction is sometimes made between innovations requiring very different technological capabilities, that is, so-called radical change, and those that build upon well-practiced technological capabilities, often called incremental innovations. The notion that the magnitude of the technological change relative to the companies' capabilities will determine which firms triumph after a technology invades an industry. Scholars who support this view find that established firms tend to be good at improving what they have long been good at doing, and that entrant firms seem better suited for exploiting radically new technologies, often because they import the technology into one industry from another, where they had already developed and practiced it.

Clark, for example, has reasoned that companies build the technological capabilities in a product such as an automobile hierarchically and experientially. An organization's historical choices about which technological problems it would solve and which it would avoid determine the sorts of skills and knowledge it accumulates. When optimal resolution of a product or process performance problem demands a very different set of knowledge than a firm has accumulated, it may very well stumble. The research of Tushman, Anderson, and their associates supports Clark's hypothesis. They found that firms failed when a technological change destroyed the value of competencies previously cultivated and succeeded when new technologies enhanced them.

The factors identified by these scholars undoubtedly affect the fortunes of firms confronted with new technologies. Yet the disk drive industry displays a series of anomalies accounted for by neither set of theories. Industry leaders first introduced sustaining technologies ofevery sort, including architectural and component innovations that rendered prior competencies irrelevant and made massive investments in skills and assets obsolete. Nevertheless, these same firms stumbled over technologically straightforward but disruptive changes such as the 8-inch drive.

The history of the disk drive industry, indeed, gives a very different meaning to what constitutes a radical innovation among leading, established firms. As we saw, the nature of the technology involved (components versus architecture and incremental versus radical), the magnitude of the risk, and the time horizon over which the risks needed to be taken had little relationship the patterns of leadership and followership observed. Rather, if their customers needed an innovation, the leading firms somehow mustered the resources and wherewithal to develop and adopt it. Conversely, if their customers did not want or need an innovation, these firms found it impossible to commercialize even technologically simply innovations.

50 Slides on Why Wireless is Exploding

Wireless is growing but if your company needs to know more of the details, here is a terrific presentation:
http://www.slideshare.net/bernardmoon/pegasus-strategies-wireless-overview-2012#

When accelerated growth requires capital

Additional capital would allow you to take advantage of certain strategic opportunities that you simply don't have enough cash to pursue on your own.

As an example from a private equity fund, their client was in old age care:

Senior Home Care, a Florida-based fast-growing home healthcare company facing strong demand for its services. However, to meet that demand, the owner knew that he would have to make an investment.

It would take the owner both time and money to recruit more nurses in a very tight labor market and then to train them extensively. Once his new employees were in the field, it might take a month before his company could bill for services -- and up to three months before getting paid.

To the owner, however, the opportunity was clear. He knew that hiring more nurses would generate additional profits. By taking on a private equity partner, he was able to staff up, take on new customers, and realize additional revenues -- without losing control of his business. Though in this case, Senior Home Care's growth was internal, other companies may find that acquisitions represent their best path to growth, and private equity capital can help fund these strategies as well.

4 Steps to pilot a product - part art and part science

Remember the first iPod had that spinning wheel to tip and turn? It was an incredible feature which grabbed an entirely new group of customers and if you have been reading the book on Steve Jobs, you will know he delayed the launch in order to build in this feature. So how can you bring the focus and excitement to your new products? Andrew Brown has researched a powerful article in Financial Post and here is what I liked:

Products with tremendous potential are launched too early or designed in ways that don’t capture the imagination of would-be customers.  The consequences can be severe: losing credibility with customers and exposing important points of distinction to competitors. Furthermore, such “failures” reduce the appetite to experiment and lead to adopting cumbersome processes that squash the ability to innovate rapidly.

To overcome these pitfalls, successful product innovators pilot their products. Just as with any business  process, piloting a product is part art and part science. Here are four piloting practices that consistently generate insights that lead to profitable products:

Limit the scope of the pilot. Keep the scope of the pilot focused. Leaders from every department bring their wish list of features and functionalities that they want included. The result is a product whose benefit to the end-user is buried or lost.  According to Chris Perretta, the CIO of State Street, which provides financial solutions to sophisticated institutional investors, “given the complexity of our clients’ needs, when we do pilot a product, we have laser-like focus on prioritizing features. At the same time,  we discuss with clients what is planned for future versions of our products so that they have a clear sense of immediate and upcoming features.”

Ensure quality. When customers participate in any pilot project, respect their time and candid insights by creating a positive experience.  According to Michael Wexler, VP at Radialpoint, “customers assume the reliability and quality of your pilot product reflects what your company is capable of delivering” The Montreal-based company, which provides remote technical support is constantly honing its sophisticated software. Nevertheless, according to Wexler, “When we pilot products, we only pilot those features that function at 100%.”

Choose hardcore users. One of the critical benefits of piloting products is to help companies identify faulty assumptions about current and prospective customers. 

To find out the rest, READ HERE 

Shareholders jumpy? Think Private Equity

If you are like many business owners and management teams, you may reach a crossroads where taking on capital makes sense. Business owners and management teams chose private equity to address either a business or personal objective.

When early shareholders want to diversify

Many people think about private equity solely in terms of company financing, yet it can also enhance entrepreneurs' personal financial security. That's because founders and early shareholders often hold much of their personal wealth in the company. As a result, they are wealthy on paper but don't necessarily have a diversified personal balance sheet or ready cash for large, personal expenditures. An infusion of private equity can allow founders, owners and early investors to take some of the rewards off the table, while reducing their investment risk through diversification.

Providing liquidity for early shareholders can also help entrepreneurs meet related business objectives. For example, back in 1998, the management of Keystone RV Company, a manufacturer of recreation vehicles, were concerned that they were  majority owned by a group of individual investors. The investors had provided cash at the company's start-up, but many of them wanted to exit their investment in Keystone and realize profits. At the same time, Keystone's CEO was looking for a way to provide ownership incentives to his team of key executives.

A private equity investment allowed Keystone to cash out early investors, while also establishing ownership stakes for the management team. By making managers shareholders and rewarding them for maximizing the company's value, Keystone was able to accelerate its growth rapidly after the investment. Keystone grew to become one of the leading companies in its industry and in 2001, the company was acquired by Thor Industries for more than $150 million.

The only competitive advantage is to have better people who understand the business better

*There is no 'winning strategy' that will boost your earnings. The only competitive advantage you can get is to have better people who understand the business better and who seek the future with a passion.*
 source: The power of strategy by J.Loewen


A client quoted this from one of my books. I thought it was spot on and then realized it was my book being quoted. Thank you to my client!

When to Consider Private Equity

The decision to take on private equity is a difficult decision for most business owners. Why bother with the effort and risk?
There are a variety of reasons but in my career working with business owners, I have found it generally comes down to these four reasons to look at private equity partners:
1) The founders' increased need to shore up their personal financial security, 
2) To finance further growth, or  
3) To help prepare a company for a future IPO within 3 years 
4) To prepare for partial or full sale within the next 5 years.

Becoming a Millionaire requires out-thinking the majority of people

At my finance club, I was startled to learn from one of the top fund managers of Canda that it is a small percentage of Canadians who play the stock market with over $500,000 of investment money.  To have one million of net worth is still rare. Here is a fun article from Yahoo finance on how to be a millionaire:

There's no real practical reason to ask "who wants to be a millionaire?" because the only people who won't put their hand up are religious types who've taken vows of poverty and those who are already multi-millionaires. Unfortunately, there's a big gulf between those who want it and those who do the things to make it happen. 
 Based on recent statistics on U.S. household income, millionaire-dom is not something that's going to happen for most people, even with the dubious benefits of inflation.   
A household earning the median level of income (approximately 50K) and saving an impressive 20% of that would need almost 100 years to save $1 million (excluding taxes and investment gains). It's pretty clear, then, that a would-be millionaire has to think outside the boundaries of "median" experience.

Start a Business
There are certainly people who can become millionaires by working for other people, but this is not an especially good route to choose. The trouble with trying to become a millionaire by working for other people is that there are always other people siphoning off the value of whatever you produce. Say you're a hotshot salesman – although you're going to get your cut, a lot of the value you create is going to get split among a broader pool of workers, managers and the owner(s) of the business.

Start your own business, though, and you get to decide how to divide that pie. Better still, your ownership stake can become more and more valuable over time as that business becomes larger and larger. While a good employee may get raises and promotions as his or her employer grows, they'll never see the same benefits (including the tax-free appreciation in the value of the ownership interest) as the owners.

Use Other People's Money
One of the remarkably consistent features of stories about people who go from relatively no wealth to major wealth is the role of other people's money in making it happen. Sometimes it's start-up capital from a generous relative, or maybe it's a small business loan or venture capital.

Borrowed money can be a major force multiplier. Behind virtually every real estate empire is borrowed money and the use of leverage in investing (whether through buying stocks on margin, buying options or buying futures) can rapidly magnify a skillful investor's success. Of course, this cuts both ways – just as borrowed money can create a large business (or portfolio) quickly, just one mistake in an over-leveraged enterprise can bring the whole thing crashing down.

It comes down, then, to risk tolerance. Those who really want to build large wealth (and do so quickly) through business or investment will have to do so in part with other people's money.

Cultivate a Valued Skill
Wages respond to supply and demand just like everything else, so it is very important to cultivate a skill that is not only in demand, but scarce enough to be valuable. Architecture and law, for instance, are both specialized skills, but not necessarily rare enough to make their practitioners wealthy unless they are at the high end of their profession.

Sports is an obvious example, but most people know in their teens whether they have the rare physical gifts (and perhaps the even rarer mental discipline and dedication) to open the doors to a professional sports career, and it's not really a door that can be opened in college or later. Medicine and engineering, though, are both open to college-aged people who have the requisite abilities and the willingness to put in the effort. The services of these professionals is not only almost always in demand, but the supply is small enough that professionals here can fairly expect to become millionaires on the basis of their labors.

This is also true for unconventional skills as well. Pursuing a career as a writer, actor or professional gambler is a virtual guarantee of poverty for most people. For those who actually have the skills necessary to succeed, though, it can be their best chance of building real wealth.

Out-Think or Out-Hustle
Lazy and self-made millionaire just don't go together. Hearkening back to that supply-demand equation, anything that's relatively easy, convenient and accessible is going to have ample supply and relatively low payouts. Since most people don't actually want to work that hard, though, there are real wealth-creation opportunities out there for those willing to think and/or work just a little harder than average.

One option for building exceptional wealth is to out-think the majority of people out there. While endeavors like writing, investing and inventing all involve a tremendous amount of effort and dedication, there is at least some aspect of out-thinking to them all. Steve Jobs of Apple , Herb Kelleher of Southwest a nd Alfred Mann of MannKind all clearly worked hard to achieve success, but a lot of that success was predicated on seeing things that others didn't see and figuring out how to do them even better.

Out-hustling is an undervalued aspect of wealth creation. Success in business is often about the hustle – the willingness to make one more call or work an extra hour later. The field of "hustle" is wide, rich and fertile. You can make good money visiting estate sales and reselling undervalued items, just as you can make good money from a variety of multi-level marketing programs. The question is whether you want to spend the hours it takes to drive the process forward.

Rental real estate is a good example. It is actually not all that difficult to find rental properties, buy them and rent them out. Do this well and it's fairly easy to earn an annual return of 8-15%. The problem is that there are a myriad of small annoyances that go with it – hassles in haggling over the purchase price, hassles in getting mortgages, hassles in getting tenants, hassles in dealing with tenants and so on. Some people just don't want to be bothered with this, but those who don't mind the annoyances can reap the rewards.

The Bottom Line
Having $1 million or more in net worth is still uncommon enough to be special and significant, and it doesn't often come as a byproduct of luck or chance. Hard work is a virtual requisite, but so too is a willingness to take on some risk (such as starting a business or using leverage) or cultivate a rare gift (like writing or inventing). Although simple living and sound investing will help anyone build more wealth, a special level of success requires a special person who is willing to do more and risk more than most people.