The answer is simple, just don’t do big deals as they will likely lose money. A big deal is defined in the study as one that is greater than 30% of the larger company’s value.

It’s far smarter to become very good at finding, negotiating, buying and absorbing a series of companies that are a lot smaller than the buyer. Even so, buying other companies is a no a panacea – there is plenty of variability in the results, with poor returns and the risk of failure high.

Some industries fare worse than others, and high tech and Telecom are in the mix. We found in 2001 that you simply cannot purchase your way out of a bad situation, and the markets are littered with companies that tried and failed.

In 2001 our sample size of M&A deals was a lot smaller, as it was only part of a larger study. We did see that some firms who had well oiled fundamental business practices, did well buy being programmatic purchasers of smaller companies. It was quite rare, and I stress again that the companies that succeeded in this approach were already superb operators.

In summary my overall perspective has not changed. Purchasing other companies is a good way to grow only if your own company is doing well, if the companies you buy are relatively small versus your own and if you have a well rehearsed plan for what happens after the deal is finalised.

One example is from ProBlogger, who say this about their attitude to linking to other websites from professional blogger sites:

“Instead of being a helpful way to share relevant content with our readers, we’ve come to view them as a way to increase our SEO. We’ve become stingy with links because we want to keep our readers on our own pages, viewing our AdSense ads and buying through our affiliate links.

It seems obvious to me that making the product (the article) worse by not providing the right links will drive long term traffic down, and not up. It will (and did) certainly put me off this sort of site, which exists to drive traffic rather than for some higher purpose.

It feels obvious that short term gaming of Google results through the “right” use of SEO results in a reader experience that is flawed, and that Google will eventually figure this out.

It seems to me that some so-called professional sites have increasingly lost the plot.

As readers what we want is quite simple:

1. Quality edited content that informs, makes us think and reflects the sources and facts which are linked to;
2. The ability to comment and reflect on that content in a polite and informed community;
3. The ability to up or downvote on the content and the comments to help give feedback to that community.

The benchmark for this today is Hacker News, which manages to link to mostly the source content and has a nerdy community that is intolerant of anything off topic.

However while ProBlogger is beginning to get it, their proposed solution indicates that they actually do not:

We all need to adopt a mindset that includes outbound links in our articles—not necessarily every article, but I think it should be 25% at a minimum.

That’s a very prescriptive way to write, and readers will see that.

Instead they and other professional bloggers should focs on writing quality and relevant content in the first place, not writing at all if there is nothing to say, and linking appropriately using the standard internet ethic that the non “pro blogger” community just seems to understand.

The survey is amazing, and sad.

My own impressions of the work being performed are coloured not only by my experiences as a business consultant, but primarily by working in sites with a safety first philosophy. At BHP Billiton, where I was a consultant on several sites, they have the concept of striving forever to have a safe and healthy work environment. They call it  Zero Harm, and the way to get there in essence is a matter of looking at each task and asking what could go wrong?

It’s simply good business to ask that question, and to also ask “how can we do this task better?” Better in this context means not just safer, but more effectively and to produce a better product.

Let’s survey the first few photos from the America at Work collection.

The very first one shows someone doing a task, but the task itself is ineffective. The worker is trying to steam a huge flag, and he is in a cherry picker and with a suport person (which is good). I would ask whether he needs secondary fall restraint (clipping on to the platform), whether they can find a bigger steamer and steamer head to improve the effectiveness and quality of the task, or whether the flag should just be taken down to be steamed.

The picture below shows a worker assembling a Ford Focus engine. She is wearing a large glove on her left hand, but does not appear to be wearing an appropriate glove on her right hand. No glove means a much higher chance of a hand injury (one of the more common injuries in many places), as well as lower ability to grip and apply force. I would ask her to stop the job and talk about this, amongst other things.

I would mention that is is god to see her wearing eye protection, and ask whether she has hearing protection.

I would ask her, and others, when they intend to make the move to high visibility clothing, as so many in industry have done.  I would also ask whether there are any hazards (anything mechanical that is moving) that would require her hair to be tied back so it is not caught.

Finally I would ask about the comfort of doing the task itself. She is standing in a strange way, with part of the jig in the way, and the task itself far enough away so that she has to lean in. Any embedded approach to continuous process improvement (TQM, TPM, ISO 9000 etc) should see this changed fairly quickly.

Next up is a clock worker is carrying a part. I would ask how heavy it is, and whether wearing gloves would improve things. He’d certainly find that this sort of work a lot easier and safer if he does so.

He is also wearing low visibility clothing, but without seeing the rest of the plant it is difficult to know how unsafe this is, beyond the basic idea that being seen is smart.

This worker has picked up a crocodile without gloves. I would ask her what could go wrong, for her and the crocodile.

The neat thing about this picture is that the worker is monitoring a growing crocodile populations which emerged from a nest  originally found in a plant’s cooling system.

The sight of over 100 police officers laid off is sad. I notice not just a variable level of fitness amongst these former officers, but also the variance in the types on police boot that they have lined up in front of them.

A fit police fore seems like an obvious step, and many have regular fitness testing, so I would ask about this.

I would also ask about their boot procurement process, using it as an example of how a little bit of control and deal making can save substantial money, and thus perhaps jobs.  It’s a pretty easy thing to settle on a standard couple of types of boots, make volume deals with suppliers and eliminate sweet-heart top of the range boots for those that game the system.

Moving on to food, I would encourage readers not to eat this white and startling yellow grated cheese - it contains 26% of your recommended daily saturated fat allowance in 1/4 of a cup.

It’s good to see the worker wearing eye protection, a hair net and white coat. I would ask whether she has hearing protection, but more importantly whether there is any sanitary protection between her and the cheese. If she coughs and splutters then that will get on the cheese – and what happens then?

I would also ask about the tidiness of the work area, which just seems a bit too messy for my liking for the food industry, although I am not at all an expert in the area.

The Occupy Wall St movement has sounded a chord across the US and the world. I would suggest to this protester that could do himself and the movement favors if he removed the nail polish from ‘that’ finger. He also seems to be wired like security guards, which is intimidating, while a little bit of hair grooming would make him more approachable.

The Boeing 787 is the first fibreglass airliner, and apparently offers a much more comfortable passenger experience. However this peak inside the fuselage of one is shocking to me. While there does seem to be some sort of overall design, the result is a complex spaghetti of plastic, pipes and connectors. No wonder the worker looks perplexed. I’d ask a lot of questions around maintainability.

I would also ask, in the very safety conscious aviation industry, whether and when they are moving to use high visibility clothing. I would ask this gentleman whether he needs a hard hat (those pipes above are very close), and whether there are any controls on objects like the torch and ladder. I would not like to think about spare torches or screws hanging around in that fuselage.

This next awful scene speaks for itself, and for a society that seems to be functioning in a compassionless manner. No doubt all of the people involved in this process feel like they are doing the right thing, but well before it comes to the stage of placing a baby on the lawn and locking the house up behind you something is seriously wrong.

I would ask from a health and safety perspective why the deputy taking the child and not the parents?  I would also ask where is the family going to stay tonight, whether the owner of the mortgge, if known, would do a deal and how they ever got the loan in the first place. I would ask the city how they are dealing with these situations, and I would ask politicians and voters whether they find this at all acceptable, and how to change it.

Next is the picture that motivated me to write this post. It’s an awful scene, worthy of the industrial revolution era, not of today.

There is no barrier between the worker and  molten metal, exposing the worker to fatal harm. While the worker is wearing two visors, they are both raised so that (s)he can see where they are walking. Dual protection is normal in smelter work, but seeing it compromised like this is shocking.

I would stop the work immediately and ask about these points.

I would also ask about the face mask, which looks like a dust mask only, and would therefore not provide any protection against nasty fumes. A  proper respirator is a lot more bulky and hot to wear, but will provide the necessary protection from toxic fumes.

I would escalate this as a great example of a task that should be redesigned so that it is safe, ideally placing the worker well out of harms way.  There should be a short term fix, perhaps involving more cost and staff,  and a longer term fix which solves the underlying problem.

And so on and on the photos went. Almost all of them raise serious questions beyond the obvious ones that the Atlantic wanted to show. There’s the person sewing boots but not wearing gloves or hearing protection, the woman serving food without wearing gloves, a man, and photographer, working in a confined space (raising many questions), and an unrestrained man working at heights building a solar panel farm.

Overall there is plenty of room for improvement in health and safety, and that, in my experience, is a clear sign that there is also huge scope for improvement in processes. Improve them both and costs go down, production goes up and, above all, everyone gets to go back to their family and friends in the same state that they went to work.

For some reason Stuff have chosen to “protect” their photos by disabling right-clicking. This is a giant leap backwards.

Firstly it makes for an awful browsing experience. I tend to randomly right-click on things as I browse, and the pop-up dialog box is unexpected behavior. It’s behavior that feels like it breaks the internet.

Secondly the pop-up box is modal – it grabs all of the browser attention, and will not go away until it is clicked. If you click a link from another program, say, email, then the page will not load (at least on Safari) until the dialog box is clicked. Try it – it really feels broken.

Thirdly this approach is fundamentally a waste of time for the intended purpose. As the picture above demonstrates it is still trivially easy to copy a photo from a website.

I would strongly question the overall intention of copy protecting the image. I would advocate to the senior Stuffies that they should want Stuff images to be spread around, with a link back of course. People should be able to tweet, email, or share on Facebook links any awesome images they see.

It’s the internet, and so the solution now is to take a screen grab of the photo, place it in another photo repository and share it that way. Stuff will now have no idea or control over the image.

I was motivated to write this post after genuinely hesitating before clicking on the Stuff bookmark just now, recalling this issue. I suspect I am not alone, and also suspect Stuff will soon see an impact in page views versus the NZHerald site.

Fairfax – please reverse this decision.

A relatively simple trading year for my US share portfolio, which was up pleasingly versus the benchmark of 0%.

All I did was buy some Call options on Amazon (betting that would go higher). I later sold some of them, bought some Puts to hedge against the price dropping too much and then managed to time the sale of both to get a decent percentage return. All of this is small beer in dollar terms.

I also bought some Puts on Linked In, figuring the price would go down for that vastly over-inflated company. The price did fall, but not, I thought, by enough and so I did not sell the options soon enough. Those options are now almost valueless as they expire next month.

I’ve just bought some Call options on Apple. The company is huge, the shares relentless rise, but the share price versus earnings still seems very low. I expect to see some more magical products this year, despite the absence of Steve Jobs. At the very least it will take a year or three for that magic to fade, but there is a very god chance that it will also stay.

The quality of the commissioned writing is poor. It’s not poor because the writers cannot write, but because their assigned topics are too broad, the content isn’t new or especially insightful and they are not writing from Xero’s perspective. There are far better sources for the article content on the internet and in books, but the authors generally attempt to summarize the topic Demand Media style instead of linking to the authorities.

You can tell that the posts are poor by the number and nature of comments that these posts generally attract. The Computer Disasters post, as I read it today, has just two comments, and one of them is a link back from the author who posted the text to his own blog on the same day. The other comment looks like spam. The author’s own blog attracted no comments.

This gradual build up of commissioned content came to a head with the Choosing the right smartphone for your business post from Dec 30th, where commenter Kelvin nailed it with “adding generic content to this blog about social media, smart-phone choices, e-books, etc… dilutes the value of the blog.”

What to do

I was disappointed and surprised that the Xero team chose to go this way, though perhaps just as an experiment. The external content is obviously poor and the reading the Xero blog is no longer so fun.

Perhaps this was part of a SEO strategy to attract more page views to the blog, but even if so SEO  should never substitute for great and relevant content, and certainly not by straying into vaguely relevant and generic commissioned articles.

I would primarily nudge the Xero team to remember the wonderful customer-first approach to business that is part of Xero’s culture.

In the latest phone review instance, if Xero really thinks the topic is important then internal writers can instead point customers to great reviews found elsewhere, and then discuss how Xero works on each of the platforms. Blackberry and Xero – what should one do? Selecting a new phone? Xero works best on X and Y.

Xero has a large number of strengths, and should continue to use these to deliver the news and views to the growing Xero community, keeping the genuine Xero voice.

To that end Xero does demonstrate to customers how to do phones, social networking and everything else right by walking the talk, producing awesome products that shine on each platform and being leaders in genuine engagement with customers through different media. Posts on Xero Touch, the sniper team, How web hosting benefits from an open API, Double Entry Bookkeeping, and Lunch with Meg are written by Xero insiders for Xero customers and community.

More of the same please.

<update. Xero agree, and have, naturally, blogged about it. Kudos>

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 170,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 7 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

1. eBooks will become relatively normal. It will begin to feel a little silly to purchase products that require cutting down trees, chemicals, huge plants, toxic inks and expensive production and shipping. eBooks are cheaper, fast to obtain and just as easy to read, except in the bath. New Zealand will lag on this one, but the switch will gain huge momentum in the USA. 
   I’ll give myself a qualified YES for this one. Amazon’s Kindles are now on sale in NZ stores, we see eReaders being used pretty much everywhere and a lot of people I know have converted. Whitcoulls and Borders hit the wall for a variety of reasons, but eReaders are a part of their story of failure.
2. Pacific Fibre will be financed, and prices for capacity between Australia, New Zealand and the USA will continue to fall.
   That’s a NO – or more precisely a “not yet.” I can’t write too much about this, but suffice to say the team of professionals are beavering away on financing as well as operations and sales. They have announced 4 major customers, signed a great contract with TE Subcom for the cable delivery and that’s all I can say. Stay tuned.
3. The Apple AppStore will precipitate an app revolution, with the best applications migrating to, and many appearing exclusively on, Apple Macs and iOS devices.
   I’d have to say NO on this, as while the app store is showing incredible results for developers and customers alike, and apps are increasingly the place for the leading edge, other formats are also prospering.
4. Rowan, Koz and Amnon will do something amazing – though I have no idea yet what it is, and probably neither do they.
   Southgate labs invested in and got heavily involved with Vend, TheRugbySite, and GoVocab. All are awesome, especially Vend (which I am a smaller investor in) which is gaining good traction. I’m going with a YES, based on helping Vaughan Rowsell with Vend.
5. There will be some significant wins in the Copyright battles for those that want less draconian protections. The lobbying from the entertainment industry owners will continue to backfire as consumers and their advocates fight for what they want.
   YES – the S92A wording in NZ was considerably softened, the USA’s hideous SOPA bill is backfiring and the entertainment industry continues to amaze with their inability to understand the internet. (Latest example). There appears to be a growing mood for a major revisit of Copyright law.
6. The iPhone 5 will blow our socks off, and I and millions of others will buy one to match our new iPad 2.
   It didn’t blow our sicks off with hardware features, but the iPhone 4S with Siri is pretty amazing (it actually understands my weird accent) and it sold 4 million in the first weekend. The biggest change is actually in distribution, as we can buy the 4S anywhere. It did not bring anything truly magical on the hardware side, but I bought 2 of them so I’m giving this a qualified YES.
7. The split US Congress will actually deliver some good legislation to be signed off by President Obama.
   NO. I think this one was wishful thinking, and the state of politics in the USA continues to baffle the rest of us. What was once an amazing example of civility, cooperation, pragmatism and statesmanship (I refer specifically to the Senate) has turned into two side that cannot agree on anything except for the importance of attracting campaign finance. Sad, but the Occupy Wall st movement, Larry Lessig’s book and what is going to be some blatantly crazy spending by the SuperPacs are promising signs of change. It will take something major to break the system, and that’s sad.
8. National with John Key leading will easily win the NZ election and form a coalition  government.
   An easy YES. I’m very happy with the result, even with some of the ACT policies if not their players, and especially happy to see the Green party field some quality new candidates and get rewarded for it. Labour suffered for not doing so and needs to reinvent themselves and their selection process.
9. Powershop in New Zealand will go mainstream – and people will begin to wonder why they ever received paper invoices from their utility.
   Powershop has certainly achieved much higher penetration into the public eye, with the switching sites often highlighting their cheaper prices, and a lot of coverage. Powershop deservedly won the Deloitte Fast 50, has a very successful GrabOne campaign and currently have over 42000 customers. My parents use it, so I’m going with a very soft YES. There is certainly a long way to go before it hits the big time.
10. There will be no major success from the attempts of large generalist newspapers to charge for content online 
    Except, apparently, for the NYTimes that is. NO. I have sharply reduced my own reading of their content as a result, and I suspect the jury is really still out. 
11. The All Blacks will lose the World Cup. Admit it – we have gone into every other World Cup looking as strong as we are now the season before, but when it comes to the crunch each players in every other team lays their individual life on the line to beat the All Blacks in the World Cup knock out stage. It’s essentially impossible to play three or four must-win games in a row with opposition like that. (Clearly I’m very happy to be wrong on this)
    NO – and as I said, Clearly I’m very happy to be wrong on this. What I also didn’t predict was just how good the Rugby World Cup would be for spectators and New Zealand. I ended up seeing 13 games live, including the opening and the final, and spent a huge amount more time and money on the festivities than I had planned. It was superbly executed, the atmosphere was universally positive and the crowd management continuously learned and became excellent. A hearty well done to everyone involved.

This predicting business is great fun, but hard. I count five clear noes, four soft yeses and two clear yeses. Some of those noes will turn into yeses soon, though number 11 is certainly going to stay that way for almost 4 years.

There is plenty that I didn’t predict, but on to next year. 

As the number of investors, founders and investments grows in New Zealand, we can start to lift our understanding of what great looks like. We should expect and demand certain behaviours from both founders and investors, and we should expect us all to get better over time.

We get better, as an industry, by doing more. It takes all types of models to figure out the better approaches, and there is no one true way.

Investors that invest and founders that start and grow companies are all learning. They are learning through their mistakes and their successes, and they are learning by investing or starting up multiple companies. Some of the success stories, and Xero is a classic example, rely on years of founder and investor experience before the company is even formed. Others come out of the blue, but the founders and investors come back for more (Hyperfactory, 42 Below). It’s all welcome, and we are progressively gaining building momentum.

What founders want.

Founders are looking for investors with the right balance of speed, expertise and funds. As an investor you need at least one of these attributes, and great investors have all three.

What investors want

Investors are looking for great returns on their investment and an easy time with it. They often also want to help. They need to be confident on the potential of the business, the quality of the team and the price of the investment. Founders who are realistic in their assessment of the business potential and valuation will encourage investors to come on board more quickly. As one investor I know says, founders should “value the cash”.

Being fast

Investors and founders want to make decisions quickly yet with confidence, which means founders need to be able to provide the right level of information, and investors require the right level of professional and legal negotiation, due diligence and contracting. There’s a common language involved, and as everyone gets more experience it becomes easier to make deals happen.

The ‘right’ level of preparation and rigour for investors and founders depends on the size of the investment, which also dictates the expected speed. The handy table below, and yours may vary, shows what I believe are the sweet spots for investment sizes and the expected time to complete a deal.

The green boxes are the target times for each investment bucket. Investing at these speeds is a healthy rate which allows founders to maintain momentum while investors can perform an appropriate amount of investigation, negotiation, due diligence and contracting. The orange section is worryingly slow, yellow unrealistic for most and the red section is far too painful for the founder, who should reassess the potential of the business and look elsewhere for funds.

The amount and time period dictates the amount of work done by each party to raise the money. Just how much work and what should be done, I intend to discuss, by investment size, in a series of forthcoming posts.

Saying no fast.

Speed of decision making and execution is an imperative for founders, as the fund raising process takes an extraordinary amount of time and effort away from the core business. While it might seem right as an investor to keep asking for more information, often the kindest thing to do when uncertain is to say no very quickly. Most investors will have defined investment criteria, which they and founders use as an initial filter. They are good tools to help to say no.

While the process will vary depending on deal size, there are always things each party can do to make things faster, or slower. From a founder perspective it’s smart to talk to previous people who have succesfully or unsuccessfully dealt with the investor. From an investor’s perspective it’s smart to make rapid decisions based on defined criteria, and to have simple processes. This might mean investing less than you really want to, or using tranches to ensure the company meets certain targets along the way. Other times it is going to mean cutting a few corners and taking a punt on the team – and that’s what a lot of this is about at the earlier stages.

Overall if you have lots of money to offer then you can afford to take your time and ponder the investment. If you are are throwing around only a few thousand each time then you’ll be expected to move very quickly. There is more uncertainty, but less to lose and higher potential percentage returns.

Expertise

Investors with industry expertise should be able to assess your product and strategy more quickly than their peers, for a given investment size. They might get it wrong (founders will see this as them saying “no”), but they should offer good advice along the way. They are preferred partners and and other investors involved will look to them for their lead.

Investors with less expertise are actually ok, provided they are bringing something to the table, which is usually huge amounts of funds or credibility. We should not expect those funds to appear quickly, and should realise that a significant amount of industry education may be required.

End note

For the record – I don’t regard myself as an angel as I’m not a HNW individual. The money I invest is generally all of the free cash I have earned from consulting, and has ranged from a few hundred dollars (with sweat) to a few hundred thousand per investment. I’ve averaged about 3 investments or companies a year for the last 3 years, and prefer to hold the investments, hopefully forever.

I tend to understand companies and industries very quickly and can make rapid decisions, but I don’t have the necessary  war chest.

I’m also “improving” on my ability to judge teams, as I tend to think everyone is awesome. That’s largely true as over the years I’ve learned that almost everyone is somehow held back from realising their true potential, and I’ve seen that start-ups have a way of bringing out the best in people.

Nelson region couple celebrating their $8.2 million Lotto win say they will retire earlier than planned.

They had a strategy:

The couple has been playing 10 lines of the same Lotto numbers, with all the variations of the Powerball numbers, for several years.

So each week they bet using the same line of numbers, repeated 10 times, and had one of each of the possible Powerball numbers (0-9). This costs $12 per week.

But let’s say they had a mortgage, and let’s say the mortgage rate was 8%. We don’t know what “several years” is, so we need a table to determine how much in today’s terms they had spent on Lotto:

In today’s terms, if they had been playing for 10 years then that is worth over $9000. That’s a healthy chunk of change, and it would certainly be welcome for the other hundreds of thousands who spend money each week. 

Where the Nelson couple were smart was in realising that the first prize is not worth much without the Powerball option, which doubles the price but triples or more the average return. Just $1 million is allocated to the first division prize each week and it’s split between 1-3 winners, from a brief scan. If it isn’t won, which is relatively rare, than the cumulative un-won amount is added to the next draw.

The Powerball minimum prize is $4 million, and it too cumulates, adding $1 million for each week is isn’t won. Saturday’s draw was preceded by 2 unwon draws for each category, so the pot was $3 million for the first division and another $6 million for the Powerball. The Nelson couple got 10 lines of the first division out of 14 won, and were the only Powerball winner. 

By picking just one combination out of 3.8 million the Nelson couple were admitting that 10 chances in 3.8 million is functionally the same as 1 chance in 3.8 million. The beauty of a lottery is that as wildly improbably outcomes happens now and then, and this helps sell more tickets to more fools.

Meanwhile I’m $9000 better off.