What is the purpose of my website?

 There are two purposes to this website:

• Help business leaders (current and emerging) succeed.
• Help business leaders have a positive impact on society.

This website has over 100,000 words of thinking which enables the achievement of the two purposes.  The documents on this website are freely available for anyone to read and download.  I am constantly learning which means the documents continue to evolve.

I have a fundamental framework for looking at companies.  The material in this website slices and dices my framework in many different ways and a wide range of level of detail.

My framework for looking at companies has three components.  These components are valid for any type of company targeting major size, at any stage in the company’s life e.g.. a pre-revenue startup, a venture capital or private equity fund, a large long-established global company, or a company in crisis.

#1 Value achievement by customers and some other members of your company’s ecosystem.

This is an external perspective, focused on your company’s ecosystem. You can think about the following without any consideration of your company’s solutions and assets.

• Members of your company’s ecosystem include: customers, employees, local communities, society, and investors.
• Every ecosystem member has some urgent problems and needs as well as many nice-to-haves.
• Enabling each ecosystem member to meet their problems and needs enables value creation for that member.
• Your company won’t exist if cashing paying customers don’t perceive that they are able to achieve some value by paying for your company’s solution.
• Becoming or remaining a large company requires addressing the problems and needs of customers who are willing and able to pay.
• Your company must have competitively differentiated understanding of your customers, and other ecosystem members in order to create competitively differentiated solutions.
• Short and long-term investor share price is only one target and measure of your company’s value creation.

#2 Competitively differentiated solutions and assets.

Your company’s solutions and assets include: products and services, reputation, relationships with ecosystem members, alliances and partnerships, processes, technology, intellectual property, and capital. Growing a large company and remaining a large company requires:

• A large number of cash paying customers perceive that they can achieve more value from your solution than from the competition or the status-quo.
• Employees would prefer to join and stay with your company rather than competitors.
• Your company’s internal operations being competitively differentiated including: unique technology, unique processes, unique intellectual property, unique alliances and partnerships.

Your company may be creating value as well as impacting or destroying value. Your company may not be meeting the problems and needs of certain ecosystem members. Your company may be increasing ecosystem member problems and needs e.g. to increase profits your company may shut down the single factory providing all employment in a small town.

#3 A talented leadership team.

It is your company’s competitively differentiated talent which develops competitively differentiated solutions and assets based on competitively differentiated understanding of your company’s ecosystem members.

• Your company’s core leadership team is comprised of the board of directors, CEO, and C-Suite.
• Warren Buffet supposedly said “You’re looking for three things, generally, in a person: intelligence, energy, and integrity. And if they don’t have the last one, don’t even bother with the first two.”
• Perseverance and energy go-together. To become or remain a large company requires never ending battles in todays very competitive world.
• The values, morals, and ethics of your company’s leaders is critical.
• Your company’s success requires leaders who are competitively differentiated.
• Your company’s leaders must be regularly acquiring deep new knowledge relevant to future success and unlearning obsolete ¹ Deep ongoing and current knowledge of customers is critical. Obsolete knowledge includes: knowing how to meet customer needs from 20 years ago, knowing the best approaches in the last century to acquire, retain, and develop employees.
• In today’s rapidly changing world, your company leaders must have fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the capacity to think speedily and reason flexibly in order to solve new problems without relying on past experience and accumulated knowledge. For example, successful startup founders, identify problems and needs that have not been well addressed before and create solutions that have never existed before.
• It is your company talent which: develops an understanding of the customers and other ecosystem members; creates and operates the solutions which enable customers to achieve value and which impact all the other members of your company’s ecosystem.
• Capital availability has grown dramatically over the past 10 years, and is close to unlimited. The availability of quality talent has had little growth.  The scarcest talent of all are those people who are able to grow and develop the capabilities of others. Great teams need great coaches and advisors.

Footnotes:

¹ https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/seven-essential-elements-of-a-lifelong-learning-mind-set

The following are links to sections of my website.  Each section contains my points of view.

Avoiding business failure

The startup journey

Understanding customers

Investor management

Corporate Governance

Creating business value

Strategy and strategic planning

Business transformation

Values, morals, and ethics

Charitable support – the charities I support.

The following is a link to the front page of my website:

https://wordpress.com/view/koorandassociates.org

Holt is focused on startups in Fintech i.e startups whose cash paying customers would be in financial services. There are 27 portfolio company investments in 10 countries. Holt Accelerator is supported by Holdun, a family office with over a century of investment experience. The Holdun Family Office is an award-winning multi-family office with branches in Canada, United States, and the Caribbean.

The following is link to the Holt Accelerator website:

https://holtxchange.com/

What is the value of a strategic advisor?

• Ensuring that the board of directors, CEO, and C-Suite are asking the right questions.
• Helping the board of directors, CEO, and C-Suite to think differently.
• Coaching leaders on how to fix their critical company wide issues.

You need a Strategic Advisor if:

• You recognize that you past experience, skills, and ways of thinking and making decisions my be of less value in today’s turbulent and rapidly changing world.
• You have a critical decision or problem that significantly impacts your company’s long-term value growth or value preservation. You may be unclear as to the core problem, which questions to ask, and what the solution could be.
• You are a leader (CEO, owner, board director, etc.).
• You are accountable for the results and require deep understanding, because you are the one who must present and explain your proposed actions.
• You will personally devote significant time to your issue.
• The decision or issue is new to you and your company or you have unsuccessfully addressed this in the past.
• You need someone to help you and your team think through what to do. You will meet with your advisor frequently, sometimes daily.
• You are willing to learn and try new things.
• You have either hired or met with traditional consultants, who have not been able to help you make your decision or solve your problem.
• You may need help selecting traditional consultants and in co-ordinating their actions.

You need a traditional consultant if:

• You are clear on what the problem is.
• You can delegate to others the preparation of recommendations for your review.
• You need an industry expert to tell you what others in the industry are doing or have been doing.
• You need a functional expert due to gaps with internal functional knowledge e.g. cybersecurity.
• You need someone who has done the same thing many times before e.g. install financial systems.
• You need outside people to help with large amounts of data collection and analysis.
• You will personally devote limited time to the issue.
• You believe that you personally do not need to transform yourself.

Tom is a Strategic Advisor.  Click here to contact Tom.

On Oct 30, 2019 I became a mentor at the Toronto gBETA program. gBETA is a program from the US based accelerator gener8tor. gBETA is a free, seven-week accelerator for early-stage companies with local roots. Each program is capped at five teams, and requires no fees and no equity. 

https://www.gbetastartups.com/toronto

gener8tor is a concierge platform for the creative economy that connects startups, entrepreneurs, artists, investors, universities and corporations. The gener8tor platform includes pre-accelerators, accelerators, corporate programming, conferences and fellowships focused on entrepreneurs, artists and musicians.

https://www.gener8tor.com/

Long-term value growth and preservation demands a competitively differentiated talent driven board and C-suite.

My website contains my points-of-view about key issues and questions regarding long-term value growth and preservation in a for-profit business.  I do not address not-for-profits, government, or other non-profit oriented organizations.

Each point-of-view is a brief article (supported by a one-page slide available for download) designed to enable discussion among owners/shareholders, board of directors, advisory boards, and C-Suite.  I have no magic “one size fits all” solution.

The following is an overall framework, into which my points-of-view fit. Points-of-view will be added and revised over time.   Recognize my thinking evolves over time, thus all the points-of-view may not seamlessly fit together.

The points-of-view flow from beginning to end, based on 7 themes:

• Avoiding business failure.
• Strategy and strategic planning.
• Understanding customers.
• Corporate governance – who make the decisions?
• Transformation – what is it, do you need to do it, it and how to do you do it?
• Creating business value e.g. Mergers and Acquisitions.
• Buying or selling your company, or raising capital.

As I create new points-of-view or revise old ones, I am:

• Including fact-based research and stating the sources for the facts.
• Adding a section “What do you do if you are a Small Medium Enterprise”.
• Defining some of the terms I use. Definitions are critical. Feel free to use your own definitions.
• Adding a section suggesting your next steps.
• Including references to publications for further reading.

I have added two published articles to my LinkedIn profile (www.linkedin.com/in/tomkoor)

“Why most businesses fail and how to buck the trend”, published in the Spring 2018 issue of Consult Magazine, put out by the Canadian Association of Management Consultants

http://www.cmc-canada.ca/consult/articles/all-topics/why-most-businesses-fail-and-how-to-buck-the-trend

“Managing the people aspects of supervisory change” published by The Toronto Centre in December 2016

http://res.torontocentre.org/guidedocs/Change%20Management%20FINAL.pdf

The Toronto Centre trains more than 1,000 government financial services regulators around the world each year. “Managing the people aspects of supervisory changes” is designed to help regulators understand how to use change management techniques.

This section contains my points-of-view about key issues and questions regarding long-term value growth and preservation in a for-profit business.  I do not address not-for-profits, government, or other non-profit oriented organizations.

Each point-of-view is a brief article (supported by a one-page slide available for download) designed to enable discussion among owners/shareholders, board of directors, advisory boards, and C-Suite.  I have no magic “one size fits all” solution.

The following is an overall framework, into which my points-of-view fit. Points-of-view will be added and revised over time.   Recognize my thinking evolves over time, thus all the points-of-view may not seamlessly fit together.

The points-of-view flow from beginning to end, based on 7 themes:

• Avoiding business failure.
• Strategy and strategic planning.
• Understanding customers.
• Corporate governance – who make the decisions?
• Transformation – what is it, do you need to do it, it and how to do you do it?
• Creating business value e.g. Mergers and Acquisitions.
• Buying or selling your company, or raising capital.

As I create new points-of-view or revise old ones, I am:

• Including fact-based research and stating the sources for the facts.
• Adding a section “What do you do if you are a Small Medium Enterprise”.
• Defining some of the terms I use. Definitions are critical. Feel free to use your own definitions.
• Adding a section suggesting your next steps.
• Including references to publications for further reading.

My website has launched, with 11 one page points of view regarding long term value growth and preservation.  This includes topics such as: business transformation, mergers and acquisitions, and the role of governance in value growth.