Lessons from the trenches and a discussion of investing madness…

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Due diligence, internal rates of return and other investment fairy tales INVESTING: SOME HISTORY My name is Gerald Guterman. My company, Guterman Partners, LLC together with its processors in interest, have been active real estate investors and operators for more than forty three years. About thirty five years ago, the company completed its first condominium … Read more

Outsourcing and offshoring projects to India: “Different Worlds, Different Ways”

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Outsourcing and offshoring projects: It is autumn; we are in the Indian city of Pune. Twenty Indian project managers, business analysts and software engineers have gathered in a training room. They want to learn how they can successfully bring the cooperation with a customer whose team is distributed across Germany and the United States back … Read more

Business Expansion

Napoleon’s Big Mistake – and how you can avoid repeating it Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France and military genius, was one of the most brilliant leaders that the world has ever seen. And yet he failed in his goal, and was overthrown. Why? There’s a story about the battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon’s army was … Read more

Innovation & International Growth

Export is nowadays not anymore a “nice to have”, but a necessity for innovative SMEs. It goes through building an international export culture and contracting local executives. The Global Innovation Index 2011 indicates that countries like France and Italy are lagging behind other equivalent countries in terms of innovation. However, these countries demonstrate a capability … Read more

Good decisions are not sufficient to avoid bad situations

Consultants with experience and hindsight can help executives make the right decisions and implement them for success “Success is 51% good decisions versus 51% bad decisions”. But actually, when making the “post mortem” analysis of a failure, few business decisions can be singled out as “bad”. Some weaknesses in the decision processes may explain how … Read more

How to acquire the company with its own money

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Context How to acquire the company with its own money: XYZ is our main competitor, with similar activity than ours, but complementary and of great marketing interest. Its 2XXX revenue amounts to $110M and its financial result is nil. In 2XXX, XYZ shareholders gave up ownership, as a result of an LMBO (Leverage Management Buy … Read more