Advice for CEOs

Bootstrapping is the traditional way to grow a startup and early stage company. It keeps equity in the founders’ hands and avoids having investors to answer to. But there is another side of the coin: not having enough working capital for marketing and other priorities to grow the company. How do companies that you know deal with the downside of bootstrapping?

On September 14, 2016 Newport Partner and Managing Director Michael Evans co-led a webinar sponsored by Moss Adams, the CPA firm, about Succession Planning. The webinar ranged widely over family business and exit and succession issues, providing significant background on these topics and actionable ideas for participants to consider.

Note: Fred Fink, is the co-author of this blog. The business model of professional services firms—whether lawyers, accountants, doctors, architects, management consultants, or others who deploy specialized “white collar” expertise to serve clients, usually with some degree of fiduciary responsibility—is based on sharing of expertise between practitioners.

A basic Human Resources best practice is to perform regular employee performance reviews. Larger companies devote significant HR resources to gathering, synthesizing and reviewing feedback from managers and then presenting the results to employees. They try to ensure that feedback is objective and not discriminatory or offensive. They strive to rationalize how evaluations relate to decisions on employee compensation.

Newport Board Group has recently released a white paper that addresses an issue of importance to all organizations: mitigating the risk of cyber attack. The new white paper by David Wilson, Newport’s New England Managing Director, and Marcus McInnis, Former Director of Operations for the Center for Cyber Security Innovation (CCSI) at Lockheed Martin, questions some commonly held assumptions and offers some perhaps surprising advice.

Angel, venture capital, and private equity funding have recently produced more startups and early stage companies than ever before. Which has led to a debate about whether we’re in a “startup bubble” that is likely to create havoc when it bursts. We asked our partners with experience in both startups and venture capital/private equity funding for their thoughts.