Advice for CEOs

Newport Board Group partner Bob Hickey was recently quoted on a key healthcare industry web site, Medical Device and Diagnostic Industry, in an article about the purchase of a wearables technology firm, Zephyr Technology, by Covidien, a global medical devices company.

In the last article in this series I suggested that a key account strategy can be a promising way for emerging companies to increase their top line and produce sustained, stable cash flow.

One imperative that companies trying to get past No Man’s Land, where they are too big to be small but too small to be considered big, have in common: they need to generate profitable revenue growth in order to achieve economies of scale. At that point, they have a chance to generate real wealth for their investors.

As discussed in a previous article, getting to scale is the most important challenge that emerging growth companies face on their path to realizing their full potential and generating real wealth for their investors.

Getting to scale is the most important challenge that emerging growth companies face on their path to realizing their potential and generating real wealth for their investors and at least some of their executives and employees.

The first several articles in this series have addressed the issue of customer acquisition. Emerging growth companies consistently under rate the cost and time they will have to invest in order to acquire new customers. You should therefore focus on finding new customers that will provide you with more long term revenue than the cost to acquire them.