Musings

Bullets Then Cannonballs

Picture yourself at sea, a hostile ship bearing down on you.  You have a limited amount of gunpowder.  You take all your gunpowder and use it to fire a big cannonball.  The cannonball flies out over the ocean...and misses...

Graham and David’s Hiring Video

Your single most important job is to put in place a great team. But just because you know it’s important does not mean you know how to do it. That is why my friend and colleague Graham Weaver and I put together this series of videos on hiring...

Effective Delegation

We want to share with you a simple process that will improve your effectiveness at delegation.  It requires no apps, no software, no software integration.  It works with a pad of paper and a pen... 

Selling Your Business

The CEO Advisory Partner (CAP) program is a search fund CEO’s coach and advisor during a sale process. The ROI is enormous, and after years of building value why would you want to leave any of that hard-earned value on the table... 

Internet Security: A Sad Search Fund Story

A few years ago, we had an investment that was doing quite well. So much so they were in a sale process where we expected a 3.7x MOIC. Halfway into the sale process, they were hacked and ransomed and the perpetrators got sensitive customer information. The sale process fell apart...

How the Red Sox Made a Championship Team

In 2018, the Boston Red Sox won their fourth World Series under the ownership of John Henry and Tom Werner. They did not prevail solely through pure athletic ability and player trades. The difference between the Red Sox and the competition was chemistry...

The Foot in the Door

The foot-in-the-door (FITD) technique is a compliance tactic that assumes that agreeing to a small request increases the likelihood of agreeing to a second, larger request. It has meaningful application to your search and running your company...

Valuing Those Who Tell You the Bitter Truth

We wanted to share a conversation between New York Times reporter Adam Bryant and Pamela Fields, CEO of Stetson. Bryant begins by asking Fields about her first management position. Fields responds by saying she made every mistake in the book...

Seven Surprises for New CEOs

Bearing full responsibility for a company’s success or failure, but being unable to control most of what will determine it. Having more authority than anyone else in the organization, but being unable to wield it without unhappy consequences. Sound like a tough job?...
 

How To Succeed in Business? Do Less

As every CEO knows, success does not come without hard work and dedication. Yet, there is clearly not a linear relationship between effort exerted and degree of success achieved. The article below provides insight into how managers can direct their efforts...

Poker Taught Me How to Deal With The Hand Of Fate

Luck, or more precisely those conditions outside of our direct control, is a part of life. Whether it’s where you were born, the circumstances of your upbringing, the health of you and your family…or even something as prosaic as interest rates…it will impact where you end up in life...

Students Learn from People They Love

What David Brooks describes indirectly from his experience as a professor reflects the emotional relationship that can exist between a manager and a subordinate. What we encourage you to do is take the parallel between the student/faculty relationship...

Why Greatness Comes from the Bottom of the Bucket

Graham Weaver brilliantly puts into simple terms the easiest, fastest, and most obvious way to grow sales: pay attention to the bottom of the bucket. It’s also a theme our founder, David Dodson, writes about in Chapter 20 of The Manager’s Handbook. Taking care of your existing customers, rather than chasing...

If You Want Success, Pursue Happiness

We’re fans of Arthur Brooks, of Harvard Business School, and here he takes on a very important topic, backs his positions with research, and shows how it matters to leaders and managers. With search fund companies, we focus a lot on implementation, but that must include our own well-being...

Five Favorite Frameworks

Frameworks are the simplest way to make better decisions, and to make them faster. Here are our five favorites. Driving Change: Four Stages of Competence. The Four Stages of Competence explains why organizations are often unable to implement basic processes...

White-Collar Work Is Just Meetings Now

While the details of what to do about this serious problem are outlined in chapter 11 of The Manager’s Handbook, this article in The Atlantic does a great job of explaining the toll we pay every day in serving our obsession with meetings...

What Is Your Superpower?

One of the five principal skills of great leaders is the ability to set and adhere to priorities. But as any leader of an organization knows, both setting and adhering are really hard. This work by McKinsey & Company adds a framework...

Talking About Failure Is Crucial for Growth

We often observed that many of the most successful, enduring people began with significant setbacks. Winston Churchill faced early career failures, and Martin Luther King Jr. suffered abuse and segregation...

Creating Versus Doing

This FedEx commercial from 2003 still makes us laugh. At the same time, it raises the question that is on the minds of just about every search fund CEO and MBA in those first few years: “What does a CEO actually do?”...

Confidence and Competence

How Managers Become Leaders

Airbnb CEO Layoff Announcement