Wealth Management
June 1, 2008
The Delecate Art of Delegating
Green Does Not Make It At The Till
"Part of being green," says John Loewen, CEO of Loewen Partners, "is caring for the environment and for indigenous people." Tsonga Shoes became “green” and manufactures in an 80%-unemployment-riddled area of South Africa. On-site childcare and educational facilities were established in order to encourage the mostly female workers to create micro businesses and sell their shoes to Tsonga for a living wage. It was working well until, as all manufacturers around the world are discovering, consumers started responding to cheaper goods from China.Tsonga management visited China to look into combining manufacturing locations and were astounded by their discoveries.
The massive, half-empty shoe factory they visited had marble floors. Stunned, they asked the manager how he had raised the capital to build such a place. He told them the Chinese government had paid for the factory. Workers came from hundreds of miles away and stayed in dormitories for stretches of up to a year.
“How can we compete?” asks Russell Lindsey, CEO of Tsonga. “We can put a story about our Zulu shoemaker and her child in each shoebox, but ultimately, the consumer won’t buy Tsonga if cheaper shoes are available.”Indeed. Are those No Logo readers in fact rejecting Wal-Mart’s cheap goods for Bono’s sustainable (but pricier) line EDUN.
We seem to have ADHD consumers this side of the world who, once they enter a store, ignore Naomi’s advice and stampede for the latest lead-painted Barbies from WTO members, such as China. How does our government help our businesses compete and how do we reconcile the fact that green is difficult to achieve when competing with China’s support of their own manufacturers?
Our government talks of Toronto following London’s traffic access restrictions. A good idea for London, but Toronto has much fewer travel options in its infrastructure and few trains to link our cities. Indeed, our transportation seems to be planned by Monty Python with Hamilton’s train track from Toronto stopping 16km away from the city, while other trains pass through without stopping. A functional train for passengers between Hamilton and Toronto would reduce a wretched two-hour trek to 30 minutes. Attractive enough to leave the car behind – you bet!
Instead, our government’s priority is the bun fight about inter-provincial transfers. It’s hard to believe that Canada is one country. And who suffers? Entrepreneurs. With so much inter-provincial paperwork, it’s death by a thousand cuts. Take a lesson from business: Centralized IT departments charged each division service fees so as to share costs. In reality, however, division heads ended up arguing so much about the fairness of the system they eventually turned to outside IT companies to get the job done. Outsourcing became the norm and boomed. Perhaps we could outsource government action for basic transportation services because there is more argument about payment for services than green action. Indeed, it’s time for the government to create joint public-private partnerships with green as the goal.
Canadians balk at these sorts of private-public partnerships despite their success in other countries. Mike Harris’ Superbuild project demonstrated how business backs a project if the government provides initial financial support. When ROM received a $30M commitment from Superbuild, Frank Potter, chairman of ROM’s fundraising arm, said, "This lead investment from the Ontario government will be leveraged many times over by the private sector.”
Potter’s words were prophetic as the private sector followed the government, contributing the bulk of cash and project stamina.Let’s go beyond idealism and get down to action.
May 30, 2008
What's Building Value in Canada?
Take another look - 114,000 jobs created. No doubt - private equity builds value for Canadians.
Posted by Jeffrey Watson at Loewen & Partners, the Private Equity partner working with integrity for Business Owners and Family Businesses.
Private Equity Growing
Private Equity at 2006 Levels
Posted by Jeff Watson, Loewen & Partners.
Canada's Biggest Private Equity Deal
Posted by Jeffrey Watson, Associate at the private equity firm, Loewen & Partners.
Raising Capital - A Fresh View From Toronto
May 29, 2008
That's some key note speaker at the CVCA Conference
May 28, 2008
Private Equity Fishing for Deals
“And sellers are probably going to take six to nine months before they realize it's not coming back anytime soon, and so they probably will sell,” Rubenstein says. “But, once we're through that, I think we'll see some extraordinary deals and extraordinary returns generated for investors.”
For the time being, deals are much smaller and have less leverage. Private equity is moving overseas. Rubenstein says, “It's clear that some of the greatest growth opportunities for private equity moving forward are in China and India and other so-called emerging markets.” John Loewen says, “We will see more and more firms begin to invest overseas.”
May 25, 2008
Innovate Before You Raise Capital
Want to design the next great service or product? Upgrade your product, but can't decide what to add or change? Add a new feature to your product, but can't decide how to implement it?
Forget focus groups. Forget endless meetings and brainstorming sessions. Throw an ultra-rapid-design party, and do it in a single day. This approach exploits the wisdom-of-crowds through a process of enforced idea diversity and voting, so no consensus, committee, or even agreement is needed. And it's way more fun.
The Innovation Dinner Party takes 9 people, a pile of diverse "inputs", and has each of the 9 people voting on--and pitching--one another person's ideas to continuously reconfigured groups of 3 people, letting the best ideas rise to the top. The process is a little complicated, but it's derived/modified from an existing rapid-prototyping design. The basic idea looks like this, although there are a million ways to modify it:
Pick 9 people, ideally from different parts of your company and including some customers. (If you don't have a company yet, pick 9 friends--preferably those who don't know each other well) Buy/borrow/find at least 20 "input materials" including books, magazines, a short film, graphic novels, etc.
Assign (randomly) at least 2 "inputs" to each person. Do NOT let them choose (it's important they not be allowed to gravitate toward things they're already comfortable with)
2) Idea Generation
3) Round One begins:
At the end of Round One, each person must select their two favorite ideas from each of the other two members of their group. So if Group One had Fred, Mary, and Sue... then Fred must select his two favorite ideas from the four that Mary pitched, and his two favorites that Sue pitched.
4) Round Two begins:
5) Round Three begins:
- Round One: pitch your own four ideas*
- Round Two: pitch four ideas from your Round One group to your new Round Two group -- two ideas from each of your previous group's other members.*
- Round Three: pitch four ideas from your Round Two group to your new Round Three group, as before.
At the end of Round Three, again each person selects their top two favorite ideas from the ones pitched by the other two members. Record these as a vote. You should now have a total of 108 votes. Choose the top 9 vote-getters (you'll have to be creative about tie-breaking... you could choose more than 9, for example). Give each person a copy of the 9 ideas, and send them back for another round of "inputs." Again, assign each person different materials from the ones they used at the beginning. Give the participants 30 minutes to use their inputs and flesh out a single idea from the nine.
Their one idea can be a modified version of one of the nine, based on their "research." Their one idea could be a mashup of two or more of the nine ideas. It cannot, however, be something completely new. Participants should be prepared to explain how something they got from their inputs helped in some way (not an absolute requirement).
Go Ahead and Choose
Now it's up to you what to do with the ideas. You might choose just one, or take all 9 "winners" with their pitches back to another person or group.