Keep focused on the "why" of your pitch

The goal of an elevator pitch isn't to close the deal.

The point of the 2 minute pitch isn't even to give a short, accurate, Wikipedia-standard description of you or your project.

Using jargon words to craft a mission statement that is safe and could be applied to similar businesses misses the mark.

No, the purpose of an elevator pitch is to describe a situation or solution so compelling that the person you're with wants to hear more even after the elevator has stopped and the doors are opening.

There be Monsters - the story of family business succession planning

Lawyers for family businesses are often accused of not speaking frankly to their clients about the need for business succession. At the Globe and Mail Business Summit, I chaired a panel on business succession where the panel spoke about the lawyers not being informed enough or preserving their business rather than helping the owner begin to think about transition.
The real secret is that not even the owner's wife or sons or daughters will broach the subject of succession first.
Why?
If you ask that question, you have not raised the issue with a business owner.
You will observe first a slight red flush and then it could rise up into a more heated discussion and maybe a full scale rage.
Everyone else will be looking down at their papers, especially the family members. No one will come to the rescue. This owner has such a level of power over their financial well-being and future. For a lawyer, why go there and risk being fired?
There be monsters.
That is also the sad story why family businesses do not grow beyond the owner. We will leave that topic to another day.

This model is a key tool used by Private Equity

Strategy sounds hard but it is actually wonderful and business teams are always motivated once they have taken the time to hold a discussion.
Don't be put off by the complex diagram. we are going to look at this one box at a time.
This model is a key tool used by Private Equity to see the attractiveness of a business. Hotels and Airlines are under far more pressure than say a chain link manufacturing company. That will impact on the value given to the business.
If you are a business owner, if you can show you know how to deal with each of the forces affecting your business, you will get a much higher price for your business and be able to persuade private equity to accept a higher mulitple.

If the forces are intense, as they are in such industries as airlines, textiles, and hotels, almost no company earns attractive returns on investment. If the forces are benign, as they are in industries such as software, soft drinks, and toiletries, many companies are profitable. Industry structure drives competition and profitability, not whether an industry produces a product or service, is emerging or mature, high tech or low tech, regulated or unregulated. While a myriad of factors can affect industry profitability in the short run—including the weather and the business cycle—industry structure, manifested in the competitive forces, sets industry profitability in the medium and long run. 

What is the job of the Strategist?

As a strategist to mid-sized companies, my job is to get senior management to understand the forces buffeting at their business. This week's blog will focus on the 5 Forces which is still the best framework for understanding what is going on around the business and how to shape the best competitive position. My guru of choice was and is Michael Porter and when I wrote my best seller The Power of Strategy back in the mid 1990's, I had applied his model across many businesses, small and large, and diiscovered its power.

the job of the strategist is to understand and cope with competition. Often, however, managers define competition too narrowly, as if it occurred only among today’s direct competitors. Yet competition for profits goes beyond established industry rivals to include four other competitive forces as well: customers, suppliers, potential entrants, and substitute products. The extended rivalry that results from all five forces defines an industry’s structure and shapes the nature of competitive interaction within an industry.

As different from one another as industries might appear on the surface, the underlying drivers of profitability are the same. The global auto industry, for instance, appears to have nothing in common with the worldwide market for art masterpieces or the heavily regulated health-care delivery industry in Europe. But to understand industry competition and profitability in each of those three cases, one must analyze the industry’s underlying structure in terms of the five forces.

How government could support mid-sized companies

The support of mid-sized companies by German government policy is worth understanding. Canadian government gives grant money to the universities but runs into the danger of rewarding the best paper pushers, not money makers. Germany seems to have managed a balance between mid-sized companies and university research.

Germany is known for its mid- to high-technology manufacturing. While the U.S. has witnessed a decline in manufacturing output as a share of GDP, Germany's has remained steady. By specializing in medium and high technology manufacturing, Germany is able support relatively high wages. The Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany are an important reason for its continued success in manufacturing. The Institutes support manufacturing SMEs by creating partnerships between businesses and universities and encouraging industrially-relevant research in advanced technology areas. The Institutes have a budget of $2.35 billion, with $2 billion of that generated through contract research or publically financed research projects. There are eighty research centers with a total staff of 18,000 qualified scientists and engineers. The expertise and partnerships created through this initiative helped sustain high technology manufacturing in Germany and resulted in a high level of market share for SMEs, fueling broad-based export growth.