At ESOMAR Congress in September we hosted a main stage panel discussion with industry leaders driving M&A activity in the marketing insights and technology vertical on “Key Drivers of Investment and M&A Activity in Market Research.”

"I'm so busy!" As summer (for many of us) winds down and conference season and Q4 ramps up, this mantra will echo louder and louder.  We trade stories of miles flown, cities visited, sleepless nights counted, deals saved, speeches given. The tally of these items becomes a proxy score for our value as an employee, our stature as a professional. “She must have a very important job,” we think, “she is always so busy!”  We’ve come to equate busyness with professional status and we’ve come to equate professional status with self-identity. That combination equates to… burnout.

In any discussion about team building these days, the D-word is sure to come up… diversity.

A growing number of studies show that diversity isn’t just the right thing to do from a people perspective, it’s also the right thing to do for a company’s bottom line. According to BCG, diverse companies report 19% higher revenue rates. Forbes reported diverse companies are 1.4 times more likely to have sustained profitable growth. The key to realizing those benefits is ensuring you’re addressing diversity holistically and not equating it to inherent traits only.

I’m often asked how to create more diverse sales teams and frequently hear from hiring managers lamenting the lack of female sales talent applying for their positions. Although sales has traditionally been perceived as a male-dominated profession, in truth, there are MANY female sales leaders— your job posting just likely isn’t appealing to them.

Although we like to think of starting a business as an intentional practice, for many founders, it’s quite the opposite. Often times, founders fall into a new business idea and excitedly plow ahead with it, taking on business partners or key employees and verbally agreeing to sort out the legal and financial partnership components somewhere down the line. Unfortunately, these types of loose business agreements often wreak havoc on partnerships. Why? Because, as a wise business advisor once told me, “money makes people do crazy shit.” Learn from my mistakes... get your business and partnership structure documented - in writing.

I launched my first business, OTX, in June of 2000. As it turns out, nearly the worst time to start a business, as in 2001 the “dot com” bubble burst. Fortunately, we had a diverse client base and a technology platform that was literally revolutionizing the way movie studios and CPG firms conducted research, and we not only survived the recession, we thrived. In 2003, OTX was ranked the fastest growing research company in the world. But it wasn’t just a strong product and good fortune.

A recent MIT Sloan School survey of more than 4,000 managers found that only 28% could correctly list three of their firm's top strategic priorities. Only 28%! Given that, it’s no wonder that even the best laid strategic plans fall flat mid-year and victim to a strategy-execution gap.

In a previous post, I outlined the importance for executives to stop working “IN” the business more than they work “ON” it. The challenge for most executives, of course, is that in order to back out of day to day tactical work, they need to have a trusted team in place to handle the “IN” work. This is where it gets tricky because the hardest part of delegating “IN” work is trusting that it will be done well. Often times, delegation happens in the thick of stressful time crunched situations where, without proper training, employees will likely fail. And that’s where our mindset needs to change... Because delegation is a short game strategy. Teaching is a long game.

I’ve wagered a bet with my marketing crew that this is going to be my most read post of 2018 simply because it has the word “porn” in the title. The fact that you’ve clicked and made it this far, means you haven’t let me down… so read on, perverts!

One of the core tenets of scaling a business is to spend more time working ON it (meaning focusing on strategic activities that drive growth) and less time IN it. This can be incredibly challenging for execs that are really competent and may feel more comfortable with tactical work, or for those of us (and I’ll raise my hand here) who are type-A control freaks and figure it’s just faster and easier to do everything yourself. Unfortunately, both of these behaviors can present significant barriers to growth.