Introducing Boardroom Metrics Chairman's View

Three out of four private businesses will not sell when they are put on the market.

For the past six months, Boardroom Metrics been working with and completing due diligence around a unique private business tool called Chairman's View.

Chairman's View is a software and industry data-based approach for assessing a private company's key value drivers, ranking them, quantifying their impact on the company's value and implementing plans for improving the highest priority drivers.

Here are some key elements of the Chairman's View approach:

• focus on value, not just profits: designed to ensure owners create strong options for sustaining and transferring their businesses - currently, three of four private businesses DO NOT SELL when they are put on the market
• outputs: include research-based quantitative ratings for 8 business drivers, 9 value drivers and almost 50 associated categories
• Value Dashboard: enables business owners to visualize company value, how key drivers are performing, and the impact on company value of making improvements to sub-performing drivers
• Performance Dashboard: enables business owners to visualize company operating data and the impact of making improvements to business drivers
  
• software-as-a-service: means Chairman's View is client-accessible and includes industry data, evaluation criteria, templates, dashboards, action plans and progress monitoring tools
• three phased approach - Phase 1 is the upfront driver and value assessment; Phase 2 is the improvement plan for the weakest value drivers; Phase 3 is transaction based - selling, merging, transferring or continuing to build value in the business based on the owners goals
• Phase 1 pricing: including full access to the tools, outputs and action plans is $20,000

Giving owners great options for their business - and frankly, seeing them get rich - has always been a primary driver of Boardroom Metrics. Therefore, I'm truly excited about Chairman's View because I believe it will significantly enhance business owners' perspective on value and how to maximize it.

Any private business owner or those advising private business owners - such as accountants, wealth advisors, insurance brokers, M&A specialists - will likely find that Chairman's View is a very helpful for discussions on succession planning, business sale or transfer.

This link to Slideshare provides more detail on the Boardroom Metrics Chairman's View offering. 

Canadian Board Index - CEO Facts Canada

Every year, Spencer Stuart sends me a copy of their 'Canadian Spencer Stuart Board Index - Board Trends and Practices of Leading Canadian Companies'. Yesterday's mail brought the 2009 study.

This years theme: 'The Route to the Top and Company Performance in CEO Transition' is and interesting look at how Canadian CEO's get to the stop, how long they stay and what they accomplish.

Some interesting facts from the study:

Internal Promotion: The rate of internal promotion to CEO has remained unchanged in the past decade (70% - which seems like a pretty good #) despite increased focus on succession planning.

Industry Background: in 2009, 83% of CEO's recruited from outside the firm came from the same industry grouping as the firm. That's up from 50% 10 years ago. One in four companies now go abroad to get that industry experience up from one in ten a decade ago.

Turnover: 13% is the 2009 # for annual CEO turnover, vs. 10% ten years ago. However, forced departures is at 44% of all turnovers, vs 27% - 30% in the past.

Tenure: the median stint for CEO's who survived successfully is 5 years. Only 10% survived seven to nine years.

Performance/Backgrounds: Interesting. In every case where a new CEO was brought in, the companies led by externally recruited CEO's performed better. Also, finance types performed the best. Sales/marketing types didn't. Period.

I'm not sure there's any real surprises here given trends in governance, performance and the economy. Thoughts?

Fortune Magazine Article on LinkedIn

"You Google other people, so don't you think they're Googling you?" LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman asks. "Part of a networked world is that people will be looking you up, and when they do, you want to control what they find." Helping you present yourself well online is just the start.

Feels like I should say "I told you so".

I won't, but I am glad to see I'm in good company.

A few days ago I posted this personal branding presentation. Today, the latest Fortune magazine showed up. With this article in it. It's titled 'How LinkedIn Will Fire up Your Career'.

Ironically, two seconds before I saw this I hung up from a great recruiter and good friend who was telling me how he'd just landed a recruiting contract with a high profile business organization here in Canada. You know how they found him? LinkedIn. You know how they picked him? On the basis of the quality of his profile. His LinkedIn profile proved to them 'he got it'. Does yours?

It works!! Get on it (yeah you. Stop acting like this stuff doesn't matter!)!!