Walk into any organization and speak with any of their C-level executives and most likely, they’ll all be singing similar songs about similar issues.
• Expectations for ’07 ad revenue will decline slightly or remain flat at best.
• Subscription revenue is a constant battle (should I opt for an audit or is it a waste of time?)
• A 20-percent increase in online digital revenue. (By the way, where is my content? Or, now that I have my content, how do I search it?).
• My billing system is antiquated (but it does its job) but it doesn’t integrate with hosted or third-party solutions. Did I forget to mention that it can't handle my new online business, syndication, royalties, licensing or contractual requirements?
• Invoicing? Is it tailored to your customer formatting? You’re kidding me, right? we’re just trying to get the bills out the door...
• Revenue recognition? I have all these new products, services..How can I adjust my revenue recognition schedule around the negotiated contracts but leave my billing schedule alone? Is that even possible these days?
• Where are my customers? Multiple billing systems, can't roll them up. Do I know my top 10 clients? My top 20 clients?
• Where am I getting leads from? Are they qualified? Do I have cross-selling opportunities?
• Shall I change my sales management methodology and commission plans? OK. Done. Then how do I go about analyzing what the new methodology and plans should be if I can't get projection reports or historical reports that make sense by product or product line, or even "upsell vs. add-on" by channel?
The list can go on and on, And it does!
I’m sure you all get my point. Some do it well, some do it poorly and some unfortunately, keep shooting in the dark.
The standard practice is to hire a consultant to come in and tell us what we should do, how we should do it, and gauge the scope of our issues.
Better yet, I'll put that as '07 objective for the technology and operations guys. But someone comes in with a better idea:
“We'll cut the technology and operational headcount (i.e. VNU's plan to cut 4,000 jobs this year) because some private equity firm just bought us out and we need to show a decent ROI in the next 3 - 5 years.”
Round and round we go!
Needless to say, your technology and operations people are going crazy!
They’re trying to figure out how best to optimize your current solutions, but instead, they’re getting involved in due diligence work, business systems consolidations and evaluations. Even the process of documenting what applications are in use across your business lines and who’s using them is an all-occupying task.It is what it is. You have to keep growing your business and mergers & acquisitions are as much of a win-win as you’ll get.
Sometimes you’ll get lucky and the new company you just acquired already has a strong team and an impressive infrastructure support system. And you get to leverage those assets. More than likely it won’t happen exactly like this, but trust me, I’ve seen it happen.
I can’t help but wonder how you can formulate strategies when that venture cap who just bought you is pushing for immediate changes — especially a push to get your online business going while you’re trying to still gauge where your customers are.Let me remind you most often the CEO and the group publisher have only recently learned to operate Outlook and Instant Messenger. Therefore, they put their trust in the CTO to push the revolution on the online business you should have had ramped up by now.
Here’s where the war begins!
Your CTO is still stuck on the problem of Oracle vs. Microsoft. (By the way, do you even have a CTO or did you outsource that position too?)
Your Marketing folks are still buying list instead of capitalizing on your customer base
Your Publisher can’t get his/her website ramped up because the CTO is bogged down trying to upgrade hardware and is asking him “where is the business plan?” so you can put it on your list of deliverables….
Be prepared to duck!
I have to ask. How long do you realistically think it's going to take for you to adequately prepare your IT, operations, accounting and finance team to support this growth?
Or, will you be hiring consultants to do the dirty work — documenting your software inventory, workflows and processes and getting your IT and operations folks involved in what they’ve been hired to do — assisting you to build strategies and proactively grow your business.
I'd guess you'll do what most companies do — start to look at ways to "consolidate, integrate and streamline operations" by purchasing state of the art CRM, and ERP solutions. And oh, don't forget a fantastic (and often overpriced) data warehouse and analytics tool to bring it all together in some wonderful dashboard-like collaboration tool. This way you can run all the stats you can think of (and even a few you can’t) before you’ve given a thought as to how best apply all the data, metrics and reports you’ll soon be acquiring.
Round and round it goes!
2 comments:
An interesting observataion on the industry
I work for a very large insurance corporation that houses many individual companies; each of these companies has their own business cultures and processing systems. My area is called in from time to time to act as Change Agents and is expected to supply a way to strategize and manage a more efficient way to produce and retain business. Locating the right individual to institute the change is virtually impossible, and needless to say the areas are not uniform in the way they do business. The Corporation is reluctant to change this infrastructure, because the Corporation is one of the leaders in the industry, so the phrase, "If it is not broke, don't fix it." comes into play. Hence, we go full circle until dizziness sets in. What to do? What to do?
Post a Comment