The Importance of Building a Dynamic Business
When I was working on my undergraduate degree one of my professors was explaining how much the world has changed over the last two hundred years when he drew a graph to the right. He explained that the changes that the world and the economy had seen every one hundred years was minimal if there were any changes at all, then in the early 1800s, he even said that economists have pinpointed to the year 1820 or 1821, the world started experiencing dramatic changes. My professor put it this way, “if alien had been visiting the earth every 100 years, when the landed in the 1900s they would have thought they landed on the wrong plant.”
It is still very apparent how much the world continues to change, even if I look over my lifetime, or my parents’ lifetime there has been so much activity. It used to be that whenever you would start a business you would have a particularly limited outreach to customers you could serve. Now, if you build a website business you can sell and ship products to a customer base all over the world. One of the technology-based acquisitions Deal Capital currently represents has a customer base of over 27,000 customers that are located all over America, Europe, and Asia. And, to top it off, the owners once lived in one state and they moved the entire operations of the business to another state in a single weekend without missing one sale. In fact, their customers didn’t even know they moved!
In a world that is constantly changing it can be hard to know how to keep up. In Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great” he makes the point that the reason many of the large companies today have become what they are is because that have been Dynamic. They have been able to change with the times. As new technology arrived these embarrassed it and found a way to utilize it as a method for better serving the customer base. It is important for entrepreneurs to form a business process that works, that can be duplicated or that is scalable; however, it is just as important that they learn to be dynamic in that model and learn to change with the times.
In some cases, business owners develop the business and build a process that produces steady cash flow, and then they like to move on to something else. They may even reach the age of retirement and need an exit strategy. In those cases it may be best for the owners to look as selling the business through a merge or an acquisition. This allows new management to come in with fresh ideas and strategies for running a business that could be prove to be profitable for the entity’s continued success.
- Covid-19 Impact on US Private Capital Raising Activity in 2020 - May 27, 2021
- Healthcare 2021: Trends, M&A & Valuations - May 19, 2021
- 2021 Outlook on Media & Telecom M&A Transactions - May 12, 2021
