Why Did I Write How To GROW Your Business?
Why This Book? Nothing else I have read or experienced summarizes the practicalities of business like what you will garner from my recently released How To GROW Your Business. Sure, there is very little that is new in this book, and I’d be shocked if you didn’t find yourself nodding your head in agreement with many of my points. But the interesting thing is that over 95% of How To GROW Your Business is not taught in MBA programs. So, to learn all of these critical elements of business, you have to have had wide and deep experience in so many different areas of business. And I have learned in my later and more recent years in business that very few people have such experience. So, please accept my share with you, drawing what is most valuable to you, and discarding what you already know or disagree with.
Why You? This book assumes you own a business or plan to own a business and you want to increase its marketable value in the most efficient way possible. It does not assume that you want to sell it. Just that you want to increase its value and that you don’t want to waste time doing it. The ultimate objective might be to sell it. Or to keep growing it. Or to hand it to your heirs, or possibly your employees, in the best possible condition you can. Why you would want to do any of these is obvious. Because you want to make money, because it’s a lot more fun to run a growing successful business than a struggling one, or because you don’t want to leave a dog to your heirs, or possibly employees. And because the pride that fueled your desire to start or buy a business also fuels your desire to make it better. Note: if you want to ultimately sell it, check out How To SELL Your Business, by me and Carl Stratton.
Why Me? I have been incredibly fortunate in my career to have played a wide variety of roles in a wide variety of situations. I started out as a lawyer, returned for my MBA at UC Berkeley after I found I hated practicing law, was a commercial real estate lender to national real estate developers and investors, launched and ran a Wall Street corporate finance practice - managing billions of dollars of public stock offerings, debt raises, and mergers and acquisitions (“M&A”) - for the largest national players in real estate, building, and property services, as well as for the earliest financial services technology (“fintech”) companies, ran a publicly-traded $1 billion dollar financial services company, founded and ran a fintech company that achieved $300 million in revenue in its third year, co-founded and served as CFO for an integrated circuit developer, spun a commercial real estate bridge lending company out of a family office and raised $1.5 billion of capital to make it the largest non-bank lender of its kind in the U.S., co-founded and co-managed a venture capital firm investing in 42 highly innovative start-ups on the West Coast, and founded or co-founded several other companies in the media, real estate, tech, recreation, AI, financial services, and other fields.
I advised hundreds of executives in scores of industries about their strategy, operations, financial matters, and leadership. I invested in hundreds of companies. I restructured a handful of them. I read thousands of business plans and wrote scores of them. I have served on 12 boards of directors of both public and private companies, and several non-profits. I wrote a book on business leadership (The Source of Leadership; New Harbinger, 2007). I have taught business at the university level.
I have worked side-by-side with the best and brightest offered by Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Yale, Columbia, Northwestern, Chicago…you name the ivory tower. I have also worked side-by-side with people who wouldn’t know Harvard from a neighborhood vocational school. I have advised some of the titans of American business on the Wall Street scale - Sam Zell, Don Bren, Don Horton, Stephen Ross, to name a few. And I have advised hundreds of lower middle market business owners and their executive teams as a coach and on strategy and team building. I have seen success in all its glory, and all its dimensions. I have seen catastrophic failure, and I have seen everything in between.
Enough background and now to the point about why you should listen to me: I have seen enough to know what you need to know to succeed. That is what is in this book. No more, no less, no bullshit.
My Relational Approach. In my experience, too many business owners have erred on the side of a transactional approach. It’s understandable. Many people are driven mostly by fear, and fear drives them to take a short-term approach, seeking a quick profit to the exclusion of most everything else. This certainly defined me early in my career. Over time, though, with a great deal of experience seasoned with some strong doses of therapy, I saw the error in that approach. I became certain that it's the relational masters that win over the long term in business. That has certainly characterized my philosophy and practice for the past 25 years.
So, you’ll see a real emphasis in How To GROW Your Business on decidedly relational principles. This is largely what makes this unique in the business world. About one-quarter of this book deals with relational areas and does a deep dive into communication topics. Interestingly, communication issues occupy probably less than 5% of a typical MBA curriculum. And yet, it is the masters of communication that succeed the most in business.
At all times, I have tried to err on the side of brevity. I have tried to average about one page per topic. You simply do not have time to read a tome on the broad areas of business. If you find a point interesting, I urge you to use the incredible power of the Internet and AI to expand your knowledge.
The six areas of How To Grow Your Business are:
You
Your Plan
Your People
Your Cash
Your Engine
Your Exit
This book is not intended to be comprehensive on all topics. Rather, it represents a summary of what I believe, after a long career in helping businesses grow, lies at the heart of business value appreciation and acceleration. And feel free to jump around. This is not a rigorous, compounding course. Rather, it is a survey of ideas, some of which will hopefully help you run your business better and increase its value. Enjoy!
GROW and SELL Advisors, wholly-owned by Traversi & Co., LLC, is a premier sell-side M&A advisory firm – a boutique investment bank – serving the lower middle market. Visit us here.
For a short video clip on this topic, click here.