News & Insights
Mid-market insights from Mike
Thoughts on growing mid-market companies.
The mid-market transition: Executive roles, activity portfolios and ‘role peeling’
…. Growth company boards spend lots of time thinking about how to get the best performance from existing executives and which new roles may be needed to cope with expansion. Bandwidth and skill constraints are weighed up against budgets, and the trade-offs between those factors are debated.
How easy is it to predict the success of CEOs and FDs?
The importance of CEOs and FDs to the success (or failure) of private equity backed companies is relatively self-evident. But to what extent can we glean useful clues from data regarding incumbent or candidate executives before either doing additional assessment work or making a decision?...
The mid-market transition: If you want to make something significantly better, make it into a “thing”
…. How do we get important things done in growth companies? Take the examples of Sales and Operations which are at the core of most businesses. For starters, we create dedicated functions and populate them with people who have relevant skills and manage them through senior managers with relevant experience.
The mid-market transition: Addressing top team bandwidth constraints
…. Managers in growth companies expect to work hard and it is desirable that things run reasonably ‘hot’ because that forces teams to ignore trivial issues. But frequently that can tip over into unhelpful over-loading where we see the following phenomena:
The mid-market transition: What really matters?
…. Pretty much all the companies Catalysis gets to work with are going through a transition - or several transitions at once.
Building value with less sweat and blood: the role of catalytic intervention
…. Some months ago, I argued that formal value creation methodologies – created to address the problems of a less favourable investing environment – could be self-defeating unless balanced by greater attention to how teams and organisations build value in practice (which Catalysis refers to as value enablement.
Value enablement: what is it and how does it make a difference?
The previous article concluded that current Value Creation approaches may, through their assumptions and methods, cause various dysfunctions which impede value creation. It proposed, by way of a counterbalance and partial cure, ‘value enablement’.
How do companies grow? Some little-known insights for investors and teams
A few years ago, there was a major study carried out by the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) at Aston University which looked at the performance over time of 48,000 high growth firms (HGFs) in the UK. HGFs are defined by the OECD as companies ‘with average annualised growth…
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