Last week in my Vistage CEO meeting, we were fortunate to have Edgar Papke as our guest and speaker. Edgar has an impressive background as an award-winning chef, musician, speaker and leadership consultant. Edgar gave our CEO group a condensed version of his “The Biggest Elephant” presentation. During the discussion, he asked an interesting leadership […]
Best Practices – Loan Proposal “Must Haves”
There are many resources available on the web and elsewhere about how to put together a loan proposal. I’m not going to spend time re-hashing all of the details, other than to briefly bullet out the major components at the bottom of this post. My goal with this post is to emphasize some critical pieces […]
Best Practices – Managing Your Banking Relationship
When I speak with business owners and senior execs, I am continually surprised by how little time they spend nurturing their companies’ banking and lending relationships. When times are good, it’s easy to ignore – after all, you don’t need much from your banker when the dollars are flying in the door. When times are […]
Best Practices – Financial Transparency with Employees
As a small business or family business executive, do you struggle with how to explain your business results and profitability to your employees? In some cases, it might not be practical (or permissible) to share specifics due to family confidentiality desires. I recently attended a local Middle Market Entrepreneurs breakfast. One of the discussion topics […]
Best Practices – Key Performance Indicators
As a member of a Vistage executive group, we routinely present our companies’ key performance indicators in our meetings. Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are simply a group of metrics that you can use to predict future business trends, evaluate company performance and make adjustments for the future. No matter what your organization does – whether it […]
Private Equity…Demystified
A few days ago, I participated in a panel discussion with two other Colorado CEOs for the Denver Chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth. The panel topic was “Private Equity Demystified.” As a post-private-equity-deal CEO, it’s interesting to hear people’s questions and comments about life after “The Transaction.” It’s also interesting how many folks, […]
Best Practices – Are You “Present” at Meetings?
In today’s Vistage CEO group meeting, we had a good discussion about our fundamental “rules of engagement” in our group. After some deliberation, we boiled it down to four basic rules. After thinking about this after our meeting, I realized that these rules are appropriate for any group discussion – whether it’s a business meeting or a […]
Best Practices – Early Payment Discounts
Frequently, suppliers will give invoice payment terms that include an early payment discount. Most often, this is done to accelerate cash flow to the supplier. The invoice will typically contain terms such as “2%/10, net 30.” This is just an example – the range of discount percentages and time periods run the full gamut. For […]