A banker, lawyer and CPA walk into a bar. No, this isn’t the start of a joke (although it could be). Rather this edition of my newsletter is dedicated to advisory and peer groups. Over the years, I’ve developed a …
D4 or “D to the 4th power” is a new term I coined earlier this month as I watched two acquisitions crash and burn on a Friday afternoon within two hours of each other (almost to the minute). As I …
“Cash is King” is an old expression in business. But I largely ignore cash. Sure I check in on it at the end of the month but on a day to day basis nothing could be further from my mind …
I review multiple financial statements every month. While I don’t have an actual checklist and there are variations from one client to the next, I tend to follow the same process each time. I almost always start with a trend …
I’m a creature of habit. There is both some good and bad to that fact. Habits can be easy to fall into and difficult to break. And since companies are made up of people, companies can end up having both …
Companies use multiple pieces of software, some simple and some quite complex. And for every one of them, especially those that are complex, there needs to be a power user in the company who knows the software like the back …
This message is so basic that it doesn’t deserve the title Finance 101. My hope is that none of my regular readers find anything useful in here but that they pass it along to someone else as a public service …
When I published Your Cash Is Flowing: Why every entrepreneur needs to think like a CFO, I headed a chapter with A Broken Cog Slows All Wheels. I never did a blog post with that title, however, until today. The …
To those of you who read the title and assumed that I was going to go political, I’m not. Although that would be easy to do these days no matter the side of the aisle on which you reside. Instead, …
I’ve worked on a number of transactions during my career. The first one was the $5 billion merger between Burroughs and Sperry. The rest have been far smaller. The lessons I’ve learned in the first and across many of the …