At ScaleHouse, we focus a lot on business optimization. Whether it’s introducing new methods, practices and systems that reduce turnaround time, or optimizing your organizational structure, it can often be a lot easier for us (as external consultants) to identify opportunities for optimization because we’re not working IN the business every day. In essence, optimization is the art of reducing costs while improving performance (and profitability!).

Service based business are notorious for revenue volatility, and that played out to the extreme in 2020 when, for a period of time, business came to a standstill due to COVID and many ad hoc projects were put on hold.

Given the unparalleled amount of “dry powder” currently held by Venture Capital and Private Equity firms (investors put more than €1 trillion to work in Europe's M&A market during 2020 alone for the fifth year running) many companies in the marketing tech and services industry are, for the first time, being inundated with cold outreach from prospective buyers (or their bankers).

Corporate mergers & acquisitions are possibly the most complex, unpredictable, and data heavy processes in the corporate sector. At one time in the past, Harvard Business Review reported that between 70% and 90% of mergers and acquisitions fail to meet projected results, while McKinsey & Company also reported that in any given year about 10% of all large mergers and acquisitions are abandoned.

I’ve worked with all kinds of CEO’s and C-level teams since launching ScaleHouse in 2015. Some were amazing sales leaders and understood how to engage and convert high value prospects. Others….not so much. Although I often encourage the C-suite to get involved in sales and marketing activities, in truth this strategy can either drive, or kill, deals.

It’s easy, in the more senior stages of your career, to fall victim to the fallacy that you know more than you really do. I wrote about this common mistake in a February 2021 blog post where I highlighted a podcast featuring Professor Adam Grant called “The Easiest Person to Fool”.

ESOMAR member, Priscilla McKinney, the Founder and CEO of Little Bird Marketing was kind enough to have me on her podcast last week to talk about my candidacy for ESOMAR President.

Although there are over 100,000 results on Amazon if you type in “business growth book”, one of my top growth reads is from Tiffani Bova, Global Growth Evangelist for Salesforce and her 2018 book “Growth IQ”.

For those of you in the market research, marketing technology or marketing services sector, the abrupt impact of the pandemic on the overall economy brought these combined industries to a near standstill for a period of time in early 2020. That said, we remain a nearly $80B industry.

Although ESOMAR, the global business community for insights and data, originally predicted up to a 30% downturn in research revenues, a stronger third and fourth quarter than predicted (particularly among tech and digital businesses) have generated current indicators of an overall 6% decline, with the industry not returning to 2019 turnover levels again until 2022.

Although the definitive impact is still yet to be seen, what CAN be confirmed by both forecasts and industry experts’ perspectives is that the pandemic is fueling the industry’s revolution, serving as an accelerator to the dynamic shifts we were already seeing – the increasing divide between digital or technology focused segments and the established market research segments.

Physicist Richard Feynman once said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” One way we fool ourselves is by imagining we know more than we do; we think we are experts in subjects that we are in fact, not.