This past week Bumble, the dating app where women are in charge of making the first move, made headline news when it temporarily closed all of its offices to combat workplace stress. Its 700 staff worldwide were told to switch off and focus on themselves. Why now?

After over a year of lockdown in most regions of the world, many countries (and thus offices) are re-opening. In addition, many companies are experiencing a post-pandemic jump in business, which, although welcome and long awaited, is also presenting its own set of challenges for many employees (in the form of stress!) after a prolonged period of isolation and a significantly slower pace of work.

Martech (marketing technology) is a $122 billion industry that is growing, on average, by 22% year over year with 70% of CMO’s increasing their investments in it.

Although hiring for positions like sales or engineering has historically been more challenging due to fierce competition for top performers in these roles, businesses of all types (and particularly those in the marketing tech and services sector where we spend the bulk of our time at ScaleHouse) are struggling to hire due to labor shortages.

These labor shortages are becoming increasingly problematic as demand for professional services bounces back post-pandemic. A report from Korn Ferry finds that by 2030, more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled because there aren’t enough skilled people to take them.

If you’re an employer looking to hire, what can you do to attract top talent?

With a potential post-pandemic boom around the corner and worker shortages in many regions driven by a number of factors, many firms are struggling to elevate their brand awareness in order to capture sudden increases in client spending AND ensure they’re attracting top talent to support an influx of new business.

Inflation has been a popular topic of conversation lately, and rightly so. Over the last few weeks prices of various raw materials and commodities have surged and show no signs of slowing down.

It’s difficult to imagine that after a solid year (and then some) of a raging global pandemic, lockdowns and, in some cases, outright shutdowns, an economic boom could be waiting around the corner. But that’s exactly what history tells us is likely in store for 2021.

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.