Great piece by Ryan Caldbeck, CEO of crowdfunder CircleUp, on using convertible debt to grow early stage consumer product companies. Shorter version: It helps defer valuation conversations when you have solid revenue, but the current revenue does not reflect the company’s potential. For the full article, click here.
If you are interested in investing in early stage consumer product companies, I highly recommend CircleUp. They have a number of great investment opportunities.
As a middle market CFO, one aspect of my past experience at large corporations that I miss is the ability to develop talent throughout the accounting and finance team through job swapping and promoting from within. In fast growing middle market businesses, there is ample opportunity for career development, but it stems from the growth of the company and the need for each person to wear multiple hats. In larger corporations, you need to rotate people through different positions to diversify their skills, improve operations and prevent boredom. In middle market companies, it’s not as easy or as necessary, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.
If there aren’t enough positions within your accounting and finance team to make it happen, consider temporary job swaps with other departments. Your financial folks might bring a new perspective to the sales or operations divisions and vice versa. It will promote better teamwork, develop your talent pool and keep people engaged, just like it does at large corporations.
A new study released by Ernst & Young examined 539 Private Equity deals that exited from 2006 to 2012. These are my key takeaways from the study:
Here is the link to the full study: EY PE Study 2006 to 2012
A few weeks ago I posted an entry titled “Do Social Media KPI’s belong on the Management Dashboard?” As a follow up, I refer to a recent post on the Gooddata blog that highlights six key marketing metrics to track and report.
They list them in the infographic to the left. A few of the key KPI’s they list include:
In addition to picking the correct social media KPI’s, as with all KPI’s, it is important to report them on a consistent basis and track the results over time compared to targets.
An article from the Harvard Business Review on the importance of good technical writing skills and why it should be a company-wide endeavor. It even comes with a complete handbook. No time for all that? Here’s the shorter version:
A few accounting and finance jokes….
What did the accountant use for birth control? His personality.
What do you get when you cross an accountant and a jumbo jet? A Boring 747
Things overheard at a recent CPA mixer:
“With friends like mine, you need an allowance for doubtful accounts.”
“I consider myself a recovering CPA.”
“I’m a CPA. A Certified Party Animal.”
“No, Irving. Obamacare’s individual mandate doesn’t have anything to do with you going out to dinner and a movie by yourself.”
Please share your favorite accounting and finance joke in the comments section of the blog or the LinkedIn discussion group.
Despite sluggish M&A activity, the National Center for the Middle Market’s 2013 Q2 Middle Market Indicator report shows solid growth with optimism and hiring on the upswing. For the full report, click the link below:
How the CFO Can Become the CEO’s Collaborator in Growth
Great article by Robert Sher in CFO magazine about how CFO’s at fast growing middle market companies should spend less time on accounting and more time building the leadership infrastructure to allow the firm to scale. For the full article, click here.
CC Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license
Should you include Social Media KPI’s on your dashboard reporting? The answer for many consumer-focused middle market companies is increasingly becoming “Yes”.
Social media is growing and evolving at an incredible pace. While many companies now realize the importance of having a social media strategy, some have been slower to realize the importance of measuring their social media activity and including social media KPI’s in their dashboard reporting alongside things like sales, margins, inventory, cashflow and key financial ratios. Dashboard reporting is custom tailored to the needs of each organization, so the KPI’s to include will vary. They could be as simple as the number of visitors and page views on your blog, the number of followers on twitter, or fans on Facebook. You can track these statistics over time and compare them to goals, or to your competition. On more detailed reports, you can measure the effectiveness of your campaign showing which efforts were most and least successful and how the social media activity translates to sales. You can mine demographical information and highlight significant fans and followers or significant mentions, good or bad, that appear throughout the social media world. And, of course, you can report how much you are spending on your social media strategy and calculate your ROI.
There are middle market companies for whom a social media strategy is not important, so not every company should include social media KPI’s in their dashboard reports. But if you are a CFO at a company where your social media strategy is key, consider adding social media KPI’s into your dashboard and other reports.
What do you think?
In California as well as most other states, if your business purchases taxable items from an out-of-state vendor, that vendor may not be required to charge you sales tax if they have no presence in California, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay it. It’s called Use Tax and your company is required to pay it directly to the California Board of Equalization (BOE). The BOE keeps track of the top non-compliance issues they bust companies for and that one tops the list.
Next in line?
For more information and the complete list of the top CA BOE non-compliance issues, click here.
The Middle Market CFO 