Cerius Business Today

Pam: Ok, let’s do a little bit of rapid fire session here and each of you give me one answer to each of the next 3 questions. Things to avoid when hiring an executive. Maria, let’s start with you.Maria: Anyone that uses the word “I” too much and not “we”, meaning they’re not a team player. Pam: Excellent. Matt?Matt: Don’t hire somebody in my image.Pam: Ah yes. Kristen?Kristen: I would like to be careful from recycling within your industry. You may have an expert in your industry but they’re just going to recycle ideas and other concepts that are within it and not bring a great outside innovative perspective. Pam: Great. Great answer. Kim?Kim: Hiring an executive that cannot talk about his or her accomplishments.Pam: Alright. Next one. Things to ask an executive that you want to hire? Maria?Maria: I would ask them, what would you do in the first 30 days on your job.Pam: Ok. Matt?Matt: What were you brought in to do on your last assignment, and what did you accomplish?Pam: Right. Thanks Matt. Kristen?Kristen: Ask them about the results from their last couple of assignments or positions. Some one can’t come up top of their head. What type of numbers, what type of impact that they’ve had? Especially using numbers other than, I just increased morale. They weren’t measuring it then, and they’re not going to measure it for you.Pam: So you want specifics. Correct?Kristen: I want specifics. Better have it all on the top of your head because if you don’t have it from your past, how are you going to measure it and monitor it for me, and get me results.Pam: Exactly. Kim?Kim: I’m just going to reiterate. You’ve got to talk to executives what can you do for the company, not what you can do for the executive.Pam: Oh perfect one. Thanks Kim. Alright next one. Company X needs to diversify its revenue stream. What type of an executive should they be looking for? Expertise, duration of contract, etc. Maria: I would think expertise would be a marketing person or an innovation officer, and 3-6 months. And somebody from, that has some industry experience but that also has other verticals that you may be looking at. Pam: Right. Thanks Maria. Matt?Matt: I don’t know that I could add any more than what Maria said. I agree completely. To me it’s sales marketing, it’s experience. It’s having experience and multiple, looking at multiple organizations and being able to look at where they’ve been, where they need to go and how to get them from here to there. So still the marketing will be the obvious but I do think that there are other disciplines that could also get, make that happen. Pam: Great, thanks Matt. Kristen?Kristen: Let’s start off with a very specific strategic product individual. Someone who knows how to productize, because optimally you’re not just looking at the revenue streams not just within the industry. It’s what is the product, how I describe the product and is it marketable within that. And a great marketing product person will know that and be able to carry out the messaging, so that not just the market gets it but your team as well. And then one great news from headhunters from that point is diversify within another industry. An Industry is vertical specific to executive, so we already have the contact say they know how to do it and they’ve done it many times.Pam: Great, thanks Kristen. Kim? Anymore to add?Kim: Really no. I just, I agree with everyone but also agree with Kristen that if you can productize, you’ve got to have someone that understands other verticals and other applicability’s for the product.Pam: Great. Thanks Kim from headhunters Alright before we wrap up here today, let me ask one last question to all the panelists. What last minute advice would you give business owners for thinking of hiring a temporary, part-time or contract executive? Kristen, why don’t we start with you?Kristen: Telling them what I needed done. I’d want to know that they’re done it at least 3-5 times in other companies. I talk to tho

Transcript Below:When to sell your businessPamela Wasley: I keep hearing from CEO’s today, “Well, look I’m ready to ready to sell my company so, I guess I should start talking to my competitor’s”, or “I could probably sell this company in the next 6 months.” What would you say to an owner on how to prepare his or her company for sale? I mean aren’t there things you need to do before you even start talking to people? Murray let’s start with you.Murray Rudin: So, I would say that and this touches a little upon some of the topics Steve covered exceptionally well a few minutes ago. But I would say that the owner needs to take a really honest look and then go. They have to realize that whatever flaws, warts, whatever you want to call them are on business are going to be found. They’ll be better off finding those warts themselves and finding, or mitigating or fix them before they start the process. SO that includes things like, obviously, get all your legal documents really diligently reviewed by a professional, be a lawyer not by your local lawyer. Have definitely get an audit from your financial statements, going back at least 2 or 3 years even if it costs a lot of money, you just want to have that. Because all of these things although they cost a lot of money upfront ultimately yield enormous ROI in terms of getting a better valuation on the back hand. If there are limitations in, as was mentioned, kind of the depth of your management team or you’ve got customer concentrations, supplier concentrations, major contracts that are nearing the end with customers that need to be, that really are critically valued business, that need to be reviewed in order that you get value form. Anything. You really got to be tough on yourself and on the business and say if I were the skeptic, what would I be worried about in this business in terms of predictability, revenue and earnings? And what can I do to mitigate that? And that mitigation effort will take time and therefore almost every business has some weaknesses so you really should start thinking about that whole identify the flaws and try to mitigate them a year before you really suspect to be selling the business. Sometimes more than that.Pamela Wasley: Right, thanks Murray. Anybody else have anything to add to that?John Hammett: Well, well your lead Pam was a classic because so often we find owners that say, “Oh, I can sell this. I know who’s going to buy it, my competitor across town I see him every year at the tradeshow and they’ll pay me a premium to get me out of the business.” In my view, selling to a competitor is probably one of the lowest value deals you can put together because there’s nothing new brought to the game. You already compete with them, if he’d wanted to hire your salesman he’d do that, and if he wanted to sell to your customers he’d go try to find them, but the customers go buy from you because they don’t like him. And there’s a negative synergy there. We love entrepreneurs. I’ve been an entrepreneur myself and they start, create fabulous companies. But they definitely do that on their own and they think that selling the company on their own is going to be easy. Um, what they’re going up against is very experienced buyers. And they need someone on their side of the table that brings equal experience and some insight as to where find the right buyer.Murray Rudin: Perhaps unexpectedly, I would agree with you on that. Folks might say, well as a buyer why would you want a seller to have strong representation? But in our experience, um, the having strong representation with somebody like John actually really, first of all it improves the likelihood of the process will get successfully completed as compared to a scenario where the seller does not have an advisor. And it helps the seller understand and get comfortable with what are the norms of the deal business. Typically sellers don’t have any prior experiences selling businesses and they just don’t know what

Cerius Executive Management Consultant CEO Pam Wasely recently led a discussion with CFO's to see what challenges they encounter that give them heartburn. Transcript below. Pam: "Good afternoon, I'm Pamela

Wasley CEO of Cerius Executive one of the largest North American providers of

contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting

assignments. Cerius has a network of thousands of executives from operations,

finance, sales, marketing, IT, engineering and Human Resources. These

executives are available to step in the companies on short notice to fill a

sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative or to provide special hire

skills and knowledge for temporary period of time. We often like to speak with

C-level executives to hear about their in-the-trenches experiences. Well some

of the toughest business problems, some others in the same situation can

benefit from their experiences. So today, we have two CFO's joining us on the

podcast: Angie Chin, former CFO with Coffee Bean and Tea, and Yumbrands that’s

working with both public and private lien companies today. Next is John

Lovingood who travels around the country stabilizing companies in distress and

then gets them growing again. As CFO's I know you handle some of the

organization's toughest problems. I'd like each of you to talk about the key

issues that you give you heartburn. You know, the kind of situations that really

put a company in jeopardy? I'm sure you all have great stories you'd love to

share. So Angie, thanks for being here today. Why don't we start with you and

describe some of the businesses you're working with and the types of issues

you're constantly running into?"

 

Angie: "Thanks Pam for the

introduction. It's my pleasure to be here. This is Angie Chin and I have

supported different companies; both private and public companies in CFO roles.

And one of the heartburns that I have been through is actually with the public

company and it relates to basically company running out of money, having

regulatory compliance issues and even concern about their potential shareholder

and lawsuit. So in many ways that all are a multitudes of challenges associated

with each of those theories I just mentioned and occasionally I wonder if there

is a heartburn or actually a heart attack that was going to happen"

 

Pam: "[laughs] yeah I would probably say

heart attack. So you also work with private lien companies as well. What are

you finding there?"

 

Angie: "Well private companies in

several cases the heartburn issues were related to liquidity, working capitals

issues, lack of talent in terms of the depths of the talent within the

organization to do the job that is needed to be done, as well as, their

scalability in terms of their business model. You know wanting to go from one

platform to the other and without the depth of the talent and people resources

that is needed, as well as, with  liquidity and the working capital constraints,

scalability let's just say becomes a much bigger challenge."

 

Pam: "Yeah I can see that. But are you

finding, as far as getting working capital, are you finding it’s easier to get

working capital today or harder?"

 

Angie: "I would say that the playing

field has changed quite a bit post-recession. In many cases I would say that

I'm going through obtaining working capital either via the route of getting a

lender, a credit facility, a factory or revolver or through private equity set

up the equation, private investors. Their due diligence and the expectations

side of the equation is a few notch higher than where it was before compared to

pre-recession."

Pam: "Hmm OK. And back to the talent

piece real quickly. So where do you find the talent? I mean if it’s getting

harder and harder to find the talent or the companies are lacking in the talent.

What are they doing about it?"

 

Angie: "That actually is a tough

question to answer and some times in many cases we would think that hey you

know with the unem

Every CEO faces business challenges that keep them up at night. We brought few CEOs together and asked them the simple question, " What keeps you up at night?"