Advice for CEOs

One objective of middle market companies that never changes is to constantly reduce their costs and thereby improve their bottom line and cash retention. Manufacturing companies need to take a different approach to service provider costs. Here’s how.

In earlier blog articles I have looked at issues confronting earlier stage and middle market companies as they traverse what Doug Tatum, our firm’s Chairman, called in his book of the same name: “No Man’s Land.” This is the phase of corporate evolution in which companies are too big to be small and too small to be big.

In a previous article I discussed the pressure that a business’s growth--even profitable growth--puts on working capital. Companies generally need to step up their capacity or infrastructure to support their ability to deliver the goods and services they sell-- well in advance of receiving the revenue that will come from a growing base of sales.