Continuing the deep dive from an original by Sean Hutchinson from SVA Value Accelerators Methodology, Sean gets right down through the financial accelerator component. He covers three things about the power of the financial accelerator – financial transparency, lowering the cost of capital, and the importance of knowing when to stop funding things that are ripping economic value away from the shareholders. Sean also touches on higher valuation, explaining how to talk with a lending institution, the Feed-Starve principle, and transferability options. Ultimately, creating value can be interpreted as the wealth of the owner, but what it should be is the value it has to shareholders and the whole company.

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Financial Accelerator Methodology Detailed: Creating The Path To Higher Valuation with CEO/Partner Sean Hutchinson

Creating The Path To Higher Valuation with CEO/Partner Sean Hutchinson

We’re doing a continuation deep dive from an original podcast with Sean Hutchinson from http://buildvaluetoday.com/ (SVA Value Accelerators) Methodology. We’re going to go through the financial accelerator component.

Our Value Accelerator consists of discovery plus seven 90-day sprints. We’re talking about a two-year project. Why do we put financial acceleration toward the end? We’ve gone through decision making and culture, risk reduction and productivity, the company of the future, and sales and marketing at this point. What we’re trying to figure out in the financial accelerator is how to efficiently fund it all at the lowest cost of capital possible. Often, the financial strategy and the organizational strategy are not aligned. You can have a good foundation of strategy, a good operational foundation and a good productive, efficient process. If the financing strategies don’t line up with it, you keep running into these blockades that ultimately are not going to serve you. Financial acceleration is also importantly about creating shareholder value for the owners. Ultimately, when we talk about value creation or value acceleration, what we’re doing is accelerating shareholder value. We’re creating transferability options for the owner that they did not have before.

When you say transferability options, what that means is we have a buyer out there and the business owner wants to sell.

That would be an example of an outside transfer, but the business has to be able to transfer also to the inside if that’s the way it’s going to go. Employee ownership, management ownership, partnership, or transfer to family. Those are the four inside options. The outside options are to sell to a third party, recapitalize the business which brings in a partner that takes part of the ownership, or liquidate. When I’m talking about transferable value, I am talking about being able to efficiently transfer the ownership of the business at the highest value possible. Most businesses when we start working with them are not transferable at all. If you put a value on the business, it’s probably more of a fair market value or an IRS tax value than a true market representation. Our position is nobody would buy your business. Particularly, Mr. Owner or Mrs. Owner, if you would look at your business from the outside and say, “I don’t think I would buy that business,” then it has zero value. The IRS is happy to put a value on it, especially within your estate. They got their own valuation approach. Even if yours is not transferable, they’re going to say that it has value and they’re going to tax you on it. We are always talking about transferability and value in our work because we think that that’s the acid test. Will it transfer from one party to the other efficiently at the highest value possible?

Continuing the deep dive from an original by Sean Hutchinson from SVA Value Accelerators Methodology, Sean gets right down through the financial accelerator component. He covers three things about the power of the financial accelerator – financial transparency, lowering the cost of capital, and the importance of knowing when to stop funding things that are ripping economic value away from the shareholders. Sean also touches on higher valuation, explaining how to talk with a lending institution, the Feed-Starve principle, and transferability options. Ultimately, creating value can be interpreted as the wealth of the owner, but what it should be is the value it has to shareholders and the whole company.

—

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Financial Accelerator Methodology Detailed: Creating The Path To Higher Valuation with CEO/Partner Sean Hutchinson

Creating The Path To Higher Valuation with CEO/Partner Sean Hutchinson

We’re doing a continuation deep dive from an original podcast with Sean Hutchinson from http://buildvaluetoday.com/ (SVA Value Accelerators) Methodology. We’re going to go through the financial accelerator component.

Our Value Accelerator consists of discovery plus seven 90-day sprints. We’re talking about a two-year project. Why do we put financial acceleration toward the end? We’ve gone through decision making and culture, risk reduction and productivity, the company of the future, and sales and marketing at this point. What we’re trying to figure out in the financial accelerator is how to efficiently fund it all at the lowest cost of capital possible. Often, the financial strategy and the organizational strategy are not aligned. You can have a good foundation of strategy, a good operational foundation and a good productive, efficient process. If the financing strategies don’t line up with it, you keep running into these blockades that ultimately are not going to serve you. Financial acceleration is also importantly about creating shareholder value for the owners. Ultimately, when we talk about value creation or value acceleration, what we’re doing is accelerating shareholder value. We’re creating transferability options for the owner that they did not have before.

When you say transferability options, what that means is we have a buyer out there and the business owner wants to sell.

That would be an example of an outside transfer, but the business has to be able to transfer also to the inside if that’s the way it’s going to go. Employee ownership, management ownership, partnership, or transfer to family. Those are the four inside options. The outside options are to sell to a third party, recapitalize the business which brings in a partner that takes part of the ownership, or liquidate. When I’m talking about transferable value, I am talking about being able to efficiently transfer the ownership of the business at the highest value possible. Most businesses when we start working with them are not transferable at all. If you put a value on the business, it’s probably more of a fair market value or an IRS tax value than a true market representation. Our position is nobody would buy your business. Particularly, Mr. Owner or Mrs. Owner, if you would look at your business from the outside and say, “I don’t think I would buy that business,” then it has zero value. The IRS is happy to put a value on it, especially within your estate. They got their own valuation approach. Even if yours is not transferable, they’re going to say that it has value and they’re going to tax you on it. We are always talking about transferability and value in our work because we think that that’s the acid test. Will it transfer from one party to the other efficiently at the highest value possible?

Continuing the deep dive from an original by Sean Hutchinson from SVA Value Accelerators Methodology, Sean gets right down through the financial accelerator component. He covers three things about the power of the financial accelerator – financial transparency, lowering the cost of capital, and the importance of knowing when to stop funding things that are ripping economic value away from the shareholders. Sean also touches on higher valuation, explaining how to talk with a lending institution, the Feed-Starve principle, and transferability options. Ultimately, creating value can be interpreted as the wealth of the owner, but what it should be is the value it has to shareholders and the whole company.

—

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Financial Accelerator Methodology Detailed: Creating The Path To Higher Valuation with CEO/Partner Sean Hutchinson

Creating The Path To Higher Valuation with CEO/Partner Sean Hutchinson

We’re doing a continuation deep dive from an original podcast with Sean Hutchinson from http://buildvaluetoday.com/ (SVA Value Accelerators) Methodology. We’re going to go through the financial accelerator component.

Our Value Accelerator consists of discovery plus seven 90-day sprints. We’re talking about a two-year project. Why do we put financial acceleration toward the end? We’ve gone through decision making and culture, risk reduction and productivity, the company of the future, and sales and marketing at this point. What we’re trying to figure out in the financial accelerator is how to efficiently fund it all at the lowest cost of capital possible. Often, the financial strategy and the organizational strategy are not aligned. You can have a good foundation of strategy, a good operational foundation and a good productive, efficient process. If the financing strategies don’t line up with it, you keep running into these blockades that ultimately are not going to serve you. Financial acceleration is also importantly about creating shareholder value for the owners. Ultimately, when we talk about value creation or value acceleration, what we’re doing is accelerating shareholder value. We’re creating transferability options for the owner that they did not have before.

When you say transferability options, what that means is we have a buyer out there and the business owner wants to sell.

That would be an example of an outside transfer, but the business has to be able to transfer also to the inside if that’s the way it’s going to go. Employee ownership, management ownership, partnership, or transfer to family. Those are the four inside options. The outside options are to sell to a third party, recapitalize the business which brings in a partner that takes part of the ownership, or liquidate. When I’m talking about transferable value, I am talking about being able to efficiently transfer the ownership of the business at the highest value possible. Most businesses when we start working with them are not transferable at all. If you put a value on the business, it’s probably more of a fair market value or an IRS tax value than a true market representation. Our position is nobody would buy your business. Particularly, Mr. Owner or Mrs. Owner, if you would look at your business from the outside and say, “I don’t think I would buy that business,” then it has zero value. The IRS is happy to put a value on it, especially within your estate. They got their own valuation approach. Even if yours is not transferable, they’re going to say that it has value and they’re going to tax you on it. We are always talking about transferability and value in our work because we think that that’s the acid test. Will it transfer from one party to the other efficiently at the highest value possible?

The key to our failures and successes always lie within us. Aiming for the latter, we have the CEO and Executive Leadership Coach at Velocity Leadership Consulting, Karen Brown, to talk about how the science of words or neuro-linguistic programming gives a window into what is going on in us that hinders our greater success. Karen guides us to find the blind spots in our behavioral patterns and address the limiting beliefs that hold us back from taking action. She also directs us to the fears that we keep locked down in our unconscious mind, urging us to overcome them and eventually lead better with the capacity to transform the world.

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Conquering Limiting Beliefs Through Neuro-Linguistic Programming with Karen Brown

I am an expert in behavioral blind spots and identifying them. How they’re hindering greater success and by resolving them, you get greater success

We are so fortunate that we have Karen Brown on this episode. She’s the CEO and Executive Leadership Coach at http://www.velocityleadershipconsulting.com/ (Velocity Leadership Consulting). Karen, thanks for coming down.

I’m happy to be here.

Karen, tell me a little bit about your business and who you serve.

In Velocity Leadership Consulting, our mission is to elevate leadership performance and impact with greater velocity and ease. We do that through one-on-one executive coaching using neuroscience techniques. Everything we do is scientifically proven effective.

There’s that E word. In some of the backstory, for you, there’s a journey. Karen was nice enough to let me know she has a book out and I read the book before getting together. If I’m the business owner and I heard you said we help leadership in Velocity, what does that look like when you show up day one at my business?

What that looks like is I’m going to ask you a lot of questions. Most of which I probably know the answer to but I want to hear what you have to say and how you say it. This goes back to something called Neuro-Linguistic Programming which me and all of our coaches are experts in. It’s the science of the words that you use to express yourself and it gives us a window into what’s going on for you. Specifically, what are the blind spots in your behavioral patterns that are holding you back from higher levels of success? We tend to work with either high performers or the person in the organization who is the trouble spot. We also work in areas of succession. Maybe someone’s been identified as the successive candidate and maybe they have some developmental work to do. Whatever it is, it’s going through those blind spots and identifying them. I’m adept and I would say, if I have a special gift it’s that, being able to see behavioral blind spots in an instant. From what I ask someone and how they respond, I can see exactly what’s going on and then ask them a question to open that up even further so that they can see it.

By and large, at some point you pretty much see all the problems that you can see, if you’ve been doing it long enough.

I think that until a new problem emerges and then I go, “I haven’t seen it all yet. I thought I had.”

Is there a typical leadership challenge, blind spot that you see most of the time?

Yes. Number one that every single executive we work with talks about is not having enough time to achieve what they want, which is ultimately a blind spot and a limiting belief. It’s something that they thought maybe it was possible, they tried it. They tried to achieve it, they couldn’t get to it and they gave up on it.

There’s no hope of getting it fixed. I’m your leader and I have more to do than they and you come in and go, “Bob, here’s what I think would be a good remedy.

The reason all owners are in business should be primarily to create value for themselves. The way they create value for themselves is by creating value for customers. One way to do that is by productivity acceleration. Productivity is accelerated by understanding non-value-added activities and stop doing them. That frees up a tremendous quantity of resources, time, cash, and physical space to focus on delivering customer value. This is a deep dive continuation with Sean Hutchinson, CEO/Partner with SVA Value Accelerators and Alistair Stewart, the Manufacturing Practice Leader, also with SVA Value Accelerators. This continuation is where we’re going to dig deeper and talk about productivity acceleration.

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Productivity Acceleration Detailed with CEO/Partner Sean Hutchinson and Alistair Stewart SVA Value Accelerators

Creating The Path To Higher Valuation with CEO/Partner Sean Hutchinson and Alistair Stewart

This is a deep dive continuation with Sean Hutchinson, CEO/Partner with http://buildvaluetoday.com/ (SVA Value Accelerators) and Alistair Stewart, the Manufacturing Practice Leader, also with SVA Value Accelerators. This continuation of the episode is where we’re going to dig deeper and talk about productivity acceleration. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for taking the time.

Thanks. It’s great to be with you.

Let’s talk a little bit about what productivity acceleration is. We can think about productivity as the effectiveness of the productive effort. It’s measured by the rate of output per unit. What does accelerating mean? That means making it happen quicker. The reason all owners are in business should be primarily to create value for themselves. The way they create value for themselves is by creating value for customers.

Here’s an example. Imagine that an owner staples a new order to their back, the next customer order…every time they shake somebody’s hand, every time they meet somebody, every time they wait for somebody, every time they wait for something, every time something has to go back to be redone, checking and rechecking all those activities, are what we call “non-value-added” steps. If you start to look at the operations of a typical company, and most owners are going to be shocked if they are reading this for the first time, about 95% of all activities do not create customer value.

To create customer value, an activity has to pass a classic three-part test. An activity, has to be done right the first time; It has to change the form fit or function if it’s a tangible product or has to deliver a service that otherwise wouldn’t happen or it has to convert data into information or knowledge, changing the form fit or function of something.

The last and best of the three parts of the acid test is the customer must be willing to pay for it. Again, imagine a hypothetical owner stapling him or herself to an order that halfway through that order has to go back to the preceding step because we are missing some information. We’re not exactly sure if the customer wanted it in blue or in black. We go back and we find that the sales guy wrote down B in the color box. That was all non-value-added activity. We’re going to break that out as a line item on the invoice to the customer. Checking what color you ordered. You told us loud and clear what color you ordered. We didn’t understand. We didn’t write it down. We didn’t record it. No customer is going to pay that. All of these little activities that are pervasive in every organization are death by a thousand cuts, and productivity is hurt..

Productivity is accelerated by understanding non-value-added activities and stopping doing them. That frees up a tremendous quantity of resources, time, cash and physical space to focus on delivering cus...

After his dad bought a Piper Cherokee 140, it became a fun family airplane over a sea-level mild-temperature family course in Corvallis, Oregon. At eight years old, George Bye was inspired watching both his parents learn to fly and became fascinated by the jets and the trip to the moon in the 1960s. He says that shaped his life and brought him to where he is today with electric airplanes. George is the founder and CEO of Bye Aerospace. He gets more intimate with us as he discusses what foreshadowed his interest in aviation, getting into the United States Air Force, flying a variety of platforms, and coming into electric aviation with Bye Aerospace.

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From Conventional To Electric Aviation with George Bye

I was inspired at eight years old watching both my parents learn to fly and then fascinated by the jets and the trip to the moon of the 1960s. That shaped my life and brought me to where I am today with electric airplanes.

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We’re incredibly fortunate. I have the pleasure of sitting across from George Bye of https://www.byeaerospace.com/ (Bye Aerospace). He is the Founder and CEO and he’s bringing to market electric aviation. George, thanks for taking the time to visit.

It’s sure a pleasure to be here.

Going into your comment and you said what influenced you early on. Let’s talk about the early years of inspiration when you were a kid and all of that and how it influenced you.

I would start with my mother, who is the daughter of a professor where I grew up in Corvallis in Oregon State University. She’s very creative and a great mom. She insisted that I enjoy and come to learn the arts. I played the violin starting when I was in third grade. I love sports. I played baseball. My dad and I played catch. I enjoyed very much the life of a kid growing up and all things Boy Scouts and all of that. My mom also infused in me the appreciation of the arts. She insisted that I learn to draw and paint. Of course, she herself is a professional painter. She gave me a painting and I’m deeply honored by that gift. I loved the sciences. My dad’s an engineer and that was a great influence for me. The creative side, the artistic side, the combination of both sides of the brain was brought and a part of my DNA as a young lad. I mentioned I love flying and from the get-go, I dreamed of being a jet pilot and an astronaut. All of the excitement in the 1960s about going to the moon, all of that was captured as a young person but colored very much by a mother and a father who helped shape but also allow all that creativity, science, engineering, sports to be combined together with the arts, creativity, dreaming and imagining.

I think you and I talked previously and said your mom got her private pilot’s license at first?

Back in those days, that was something. In the early to mid-1960s, women did not fly. Getting a private license first inspired the family and me as an eight-year-old in those days. Dad is next. They both became private pilots. We bought a Piper Cherokee 140, believe it or not. As a family in Corvallis, Oregon with sea level mild temperatures, that was a fun family airplane. There were two of us boys at that time. My sister came a little bit later, but we love flying and that captured me. I was hooked. I set the path for my life at that moment going forward.

Do you remember the first time your mom gave you tutorial?

I do and it was an amazing feeling. You think two dimensionally.

How old were you when you did that?

That was all between eight, nine, ten until sixth grade, twelve years old. All of those early experiences of flying, you go from a very two-dimensional experience in life to flying as three dimensional. Going left, going right, going faster, going slower was something that was pretty easy to ...

Everybody understands what productivity is. It’s basically doing more with less. The former chairman of Procter and Gamble once said productivity is everything in every business. Sean Hutchinson, CEO/Partner of SVA Value Accelerators, talks about the productivity accelerator which is the fourth out of seven value accelerators. Sean says the reason that it’s in the middle is that it provides an important inflection point built on what’s happened before and it’s a predictor of what happens in the future. Learn more about productivity as Sean talks about the tools for productivity, the value-added process mapping, quality control, risk reduction, and more.

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Productivity: Creating The Path To Higher Valuation with CEO/Partner Sean Hutchinson

Creating The Path To Higher Valuation with CEO/Partner Sean Hutchinson

We’re doing a continuation deep dive from an original podcast. We did it with Sean Hutchinson of http://buildvaluetoday.com/ (SVA Value Accelerators). What we’re going to be talking about is part of the Value Acceleration methodology. We’re going to be talking about the productivity portion of that. Sean, thanks again.

The former chairman of Procter and Gamble once said, “Productivity is everything in every business.” This particular piece of our Value Accelerator, the Productivity Accelerator, comes four out of seven. The reason that it’s in the middle is that it provides an important inflection point built on what’s happened before and it’s a predictor of what happens in the future. Value creation and value acceleration tend to not be linear. It’s more of a slow climb and then there’s an inflection point where it takes off. The exponential value curve is a scoop. One of the things that inflects that curve and gets it to move into a steep incline is increases in productivity. Everybody understands what productivity is but it’s doing more with less. There are a couple of different places in your numbers that you’re going to see it on your financial statements, but one place is in the gross margin. Not the net margin necessarily.

The gross margin is the indicator of financial productivity in the organization, of essential throughput of the assets. How quickly did they get through the organization? How quickly did they produce income cash? How quickly did they generate margin? Productivity is about not just efficiency, but it’s also about velocity. It’s also about the efficient use of capital within the organization. What are the tools that we use? One tool is called $50 to $5,000. It is a concept that came out of Rob Slee’s book, https://www.amazon.com/Midas-Managers-Rob-Slee/dp/0979047803 (Midas Managers). It’s an amazing concept and it’s been effective with our clients. If I go into a management team for instance or even talking to an owner and I say, “How much of your day do you spend doing $50 an hour work?” If they don’t land immediately on a percentage, which tends to be in the 90% of the day or above then the answer is way too much. That’s an immediate acknowledgment that productivity in the organization even at the top is dampened. It’s restricted. The reason for that is that not just the CEO, but everybody else in the organization is working on the wrong stuff.

There may be delegation problems. There may be process problems. There may be culture and communication problems. At the end of the day, stuff’s getting stuck in the organization. What we want in order to create economic value is for the highest-level strategic thinkers in the organization to be doing $5,000 an hour work. That’s where the juice gets put into the deal. Being aware is one piece of it. How much $50 an hour work are you doing?

When we say higher valuation, many business owners focus more on profits than actually looking into the threats to earning those profits. Sean Hutchinson and Alistair Stewart of SVA Value Accelerators talk about the importance of risk reduction. Together, they lay down the five categories of risks out there for business owners to consider: strategic, compliance, operational, financial, and reputational risk. They present situations and solutions that could help you picture out how to overcome them. They also talk about whether owners are aware of these risks while discussing a de-risked company versus a risky company and the value gap between them.

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Rapid Risk Reduction Methodology Detailed: Creating The Path To Higher Valuation with CEO/Partner Sean Hutchinson SVA Value Accelerators and Alistair Stewart

Creating The Path To Higher Valuation with CEO/Partner Sean Hutchinson

Risks are the consequences of an action, an event that is reasonably likely to undermine or threaten goals or objectives that have been determined. There are things you can do or stop doing to increase enterprise value that are counter-intuitive and will increase the value of your business.

We’re doing a deep dive continuation with Sean Hutchinson, CEO, and Partner with http://buildvaluetoday.com/ (SVA Value Accelerators) and Alistair Stewart. He’s the Manufacturing Practice Leader from SVA Value Accelerators. We’re going to dig deeper and we’re going to talk about rapid risk reduction. Alistair, let us know.

Risks are out there in a variety of categories and most business owners and people working in the business become a little desensitized to them. You can think of risks as being in a broad spectrum of categories. Strategic risk, compliance risk, operational risk, financial risk, and reputational risk. Those are five broad categories. We can also consider that risks exist within a business and risks exist outside of a business. If we look at how businesses are valued. If we look at the worth of a business, it’s pretty obvious to financial investors and pretty opaque to owners and employees that reducing risk represents a tremendous opportunity to increase the value of a business, particularly the transferable value of a business.

We can look at say strategic risk. Strategic risk is something that threatens the outcomes that a business has chosen to pursue. There’s a little bit of an eye-opener there. Are we choosing our outcomes? Do we understand the threats that compromise our ability to realize those outcomes? What might those risks, those threats be? We can go down the list of compliance if that matters to the industry that you’re in, operational, financial and reputational. A fairly straightforward discussion on those topics will reveal a tremendous amount of business value, of enterprise value, that’s threatened by inattention to these existential matters.

In these three categories of how to increase the value of the business, increasing earnings, reducing risk and increasing marketability, those broad categories, a lot of business owners and their teams are going to focus on increasing earnings as an instinctual way to increase the value of a business. That’s understandable. That’s where a lot of resources go. When we see that big category of things that you have to do to reduce risk or should do, could do or will do, less attention is typically paid to those things. They can have a dramatic effect immediately on the economic enterprise value, transferable enterprise value, and we can add value. What people need to realize, what owners might tune in on here, is that we can add value to our business pretty dramatically without adding $1 of revenue or $1 of profit. Those things in the beginning of the value acceleration process have less eff...

Women who are newly diagnosed with breast cancer are shocked at how emotional the experience is. They’re finding that their emotions range from extremes as everything seems to all of a sudden get amplified in their life. Diane Simard, author of The Unlikely Gift of Breast Cancer, goes into her own personal experience of going through and surviving Stage 3 breast cancer. She’s here to talk about her book, the diagnosis, her treatments, and her advocacy for individualized psychosocial support for cancer survivors and their caregivers.

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The Unlikely Gift Of Breast Cancer with Diane Simard

I’m http://businessleaderspodcast.com/diane-simard-world-class-businesswoman-angel-investor-stage-3-breast-cancer-survivor-data-capture-my-why-evolution/ (Diane M. Simard) coming to you from https://www.byeaerospace.com/ (Bye Aerospace) in lovely Centennial, Colorado. I’m thrilled to be on the show as part of a follow on. I’m here to talk about my experience now that I’ve published a book that I wrote called https://www.dianemsimard.com/book/ (The Unlikely Gift of Breast Cancer). I’m here to talk about how much fun I’m having integrating my life as an author and also my life as a Senior Vice President and Board Member for this amazing company that’s developing what we believe will be the world’s first FAA Part 23 certified airplane called eFlyer. We’re targeting the flight training market. What I’m finding out is that my book, which I finished and published, is appealing to two different sets of folks. One is newly diagnosed women with breast cancer who are shocked at how emotional this experience is. They’re finding that their emotions range from extremes and as I always say, “Everything seems to all of a sudden get amplified in your life.” Your highs are higher, your lows are lower. What this book does is go into my personal experience. It’s not a self-help book or “Do this, don’t do that” book. It’s the story about my experience, how I felt these same emotions and what I did about it.

Secondly, the other group that is finding this book appealing are those who are either survivors themselves or caregivers to survivors who wonder what this experience is like. One thing that I did is I set out to capture what it tastes, feels and smells like to go through what I call the nuclear bomb treatment, which includes chemo, surgery and radiation. It’s a very vivid recap of what I experienced, how I reacted, how I responded and what I did about it. I happen to find that journaling was very soothing for me. That journal is what turned into this story that I just published.

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https://www.dianemsimard.com (Diane), thank you so much for sitting down again. This is our second time. For many, if not all, we all have cancer somewhere in our families. It’s been in my family. We had a friend that got re-diagnosed here. The journey continues. What I thought was most important about this is that you had the courage and foresight to write the book, put yourself out there and push yourself at risk. At the same time, you’re very busy with Bye Aerospace and life goes on. I wanted to make sure we did this and why in this show? The cancer for you was during your business career. There are many different business owners that have either themselves or loved ones or people in their business that are diagnosed with cancer. I thought it was important to go back to this again. We’re going to talk about the book. Some of the things that maybe people don’t think would be what they would think is an outcome. For the book, diagnosis, treatment and advocacy, let’s talk about that.

Writing the book was part of my healing process and continues...

A lot of people put their career first over everything else for a long period of time, and there are consequences to that. Doug Robinson always wanted to have a more balanced life between work, family and community, and so when an opportunity presented itself, he made the choice to move to Colorado to have a shot at it. Gathering the right people, he formed a successful organization and started his own firm. He is now the managing partner of Dry Fly Capital, a private equity firm casting vision for legacy business operations to expand into growth. Doug talks about the tradeoffs of creating your own firm, closing transactions, bringing companies to market, the culture, vision, and core principles of his firm, and more.

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Transitioning Into Running Your Own Firm with Doug Robinson

We have Doug Robinson as our guest. He’s the Managing Partner of https://www.dryflycap.com/ (Dry Fly Capital). He’s an adjunct professor of Finance at the University of Colorado Boulder and he is a former candidate for the Governor of the State of Colorado. Doug, you have a deep and varied background. Let’s dive into your background and talk about the journey.

I’m a father of five and married to the same woman for many years. The kids turned out okay. Our oldest is 28. The youngest is a junior in high school. We have one at home still. That’s what I’m most proud of. Along the way, I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve been an entrepreneur. I started businesses. I’ve managed larger companies. I ran for political office. Now, we have an independent private equity firm and we have four portfolio companies. It looks like we’re about to have a fifth. We have purchased companies and installed management and running those companies as well. I’ve had a great life. I was born in Michigan. I got to New York out of college. I spent several years in New York and many years in Colorado.

When you came out of college, what was your skill set that you got in college that took you to New York City?

I discovered along the way in college that I liked numbers. I liked finance. I had an internship on the bond desk at First Interstate Bank in Los Angeles. I interviewed and found a way to get back to New York and took a job as an investment banker, as an analyst at Dean Witter in 2 World Trade Center. I didn’t realize at the time I was signing up for about 80 to 90-hour average weeks. That was quite an education.

As a credit analyst in the bond market, those guys go deep in the balance sheets to make sure the credit quality is sorted out. I think more about a company from their balance sheet than perhaps the equity side does, in my opinion.

The balance sheet tells you everything. Balance sheet, cashflow, income statement, that’s usually where people start. That’s the least important of the three statements, but they’re all important.

You were at Dean Witter, which is no longer with us.

Dean Witter is now part of Morgan Stanley. I went back to business school. I went to Columbia Business School in New York with an emphasis on finance. I came out and joined a media company in their corporate development group, Maxwell Macmillan, Macmillan Publishing. I was on a team where we brought 23 companies over a couple of years span. I was recruited and I joined a firm called Hambrecht and Quist, which was an early underwriter taking companies public technology companies based in San Francisco. I was in New York. There were lots of travel back and forth, but we were doing IPOs primarily for emerging internet and technology companies along the way. I was traveling so much my wife said, “Is this what we signed up for?”

You were married to her these days?

I was married. We just had our third child. Out of the blue, I had a new assignment in Colorado.