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Did You Know Exit Planning Takes 7 Years? Where Are You At?

Published: by bethfarnham
Did You Know Exit Planning Takes 7 Years? Where Are You At?

Succession planning and/or exit planning is a very common topic we encounter as CFO’s when addressing a client’s top list of priorities.

In fact, a current client of mine has listed exit planning as their number one priority to be achieved over the next two years. “I want out in two years, and I want $xxxx!”

Business owners spend years building their businesses, nurturing, and developing them. For the most part, the very reason they started the business was inspired by a passion or an idea. Usually around a certain product or service that they felt could not only be a commercial success, but one that would make a difference.

Common Scenarios

A common scenario we encounter as CFOs at the CFO Centre is a client up to their neck in meeting the day-to-day challenges of keeping the business “running smoothly” but just don’t have the time or wherewithal to put in place the mechanisms or strategies to set the business up for succession or exit.

In fact, we find the opposite. Business owners becoming so entwined in the business that they are involved in every aspect requiring their input. This makes the business impossible to feel separate as a stand alone entity, also making it even less attractive for a prospective purchaser.

Many business owners want that elusive buyer to walk through the door and offer a nice big settlement. The owner can then sail off into the sunset with a suitcase full of retirement cash.

This is not exit planning this is mostly wishful thinking. However, all is not lost and this is where we at the CFO Centre can help.

As I mentioned I currently have a client that wants to sell all or some of his business that he has built over the past twenty years. It is in manufacturing and in an industry that has its own set of unique challenges in terms of risk profile. So what can we do to assist?

Just like a real estate agent advising a client the things to put in place when selling a house, we can apply independence, objectivity, and non-emotional advice on how to position a business for sale.

Like anything that is worthwhile, setting up and executing exit planning or putting in place a successor takes time. Furthermore, this can take years to achieve. It is not a quick fix. Like a health check we need to implement the fundamentals that make a business successful and independent. Using our matrix of twelve financial building blocks we build the platform which enables you to ‘own’ rather than ‘run’ your business.

A more in-depth discussion can be had around our 12-box program but in essence they are:

The 12 boxes

Ideally, we address all operational issues 1st and foremost at the outset of our engagement in conjunction with our 4 boxes of business support. Implementing the 4 fundamental operational boxes sets up a healthy platform for the business making the business all that more appealing to a prospective buyer.

Once these are in place, we then transition into more of a strategic role. We can be that mind and voice of objectivity and independence. This is especially helpful in family companies whereby that non-biased voice of reason is so critical when making strategic decisions.

Here at the CFO Centre, we have an extensive network of affiliated partners. This includes business brokers, tax accountants, legal practitioners etc. This assists in providing great support under the business support matrix (above), together with our extensive network of CFO’s and their clients. Such a large business database is helpful when trying to attract interested parties for an owner motivated to think about exit planning. Never underestimate the power of our network.

There are other ways for an owner to think about exit planning other than a sale.

The most obvious being succession planning. Someone, or a group of employees within the organisation  take over from you as the owner/operator. This does require years of training. Ideally one recruits or selects someone within the organisation that shows good leadership and management skills. Normally, this person will come with an entrenched set of skills – either sales/marketing, finance or operational. Whatever that skill base may be, one then needs to embark on a program of broadening these skills. They should encompass a good grounding in all key commercial disciplines – sales/marketing, finance and operations.

It is then critical to tie this person’s remuneration to the performance goals of the business. So when these are met, the individual concerned is rewarded – ideally through equity participation in the business. When I joined Australis Music back in 1996 as Finance Manager this was my exact path. Ultimately, I took over the CEO’s role from the Owner/Founder, Peter Hayward, in 2003. So, seven years of grooming and slowly handing the reigns. When Peter sadly passed away unexpectedly in 2006, he had done all things necessary to ensure that the company was in safe hands and that his largest asset was protected. I continued to oversee the company as CEO for three years after his passing, and ultimately sold the business to private equity.

The Moral?

The moral of this story – 7 years. 7 years it took to develop and execute the exit planning. By applying our 12 financial building boxes we can play a key role as your part time CFO. Assisting in the execution of your succession/exit plan. The key however this is a process and not a quick fix that can take years to implement.

Find our more on exit planning by reading our other exit planning blogs. Also this great article from Inc.com discussing the emotional toll of founders’ exit planning.

Outsource To Free Up Your Time And Save Money

Published: by bethfarnham
Outsource To Free Up Your Time And Save Money

Outsourcing is nearly always cheaper, more efficient, and more flexible than hiring in-house staff. You can use outsourcing to tap into expertise and experience not available in-house (technical or managerial) or to identify and then reduce the costs of support services.

But concerns about the potential pitfalls of outsourcing stop SMEs from seeing the many benefits of outsourcing (which would allow their full-time employees to work on the company’s core competencies).

A part-time CFO can help you to leverage outsourcing, allowing you to operate a leaner, more efficient business and use the savings to drive growth. In these articles, you will see:

  • The benefits of outsourcing
  • What can be outsourced
  • How to use outsourcing in your organization
  • The main reasons companies don’t outsource
  • How a part-time CFO can help you to leverage outsourcing

A desire to focus on core activities is one of the main reasons companies of any size choose to outsource one or more of their support functions. 

You can use outsourcing to tap into expertise and experience not available in-house (technical or managerial) or to identify and then reduce the costs of support services. But outsourcing is something that worries many SME owners. They fear that outsourcing non-core aspects of the business like finance, HR, IT or managing customer relationships will lessen their overall control of the company. Or that it will be restrictive or expensive.

You might feel that not being able to see and talk to your team will mean that you are less in control and that you lack the visibility to spot potential problems and take decisive action.

You might worry too about the track record of your chosen outsourced provider. Will they maintain the high standards you insist on and deliver quality within the deadlines you prescribe?

Or maybe you worry about costs: will the prices quoted by your provider be set in stone or as the relationship develops, will a number of hidden costs emerge (licence fees, annual renewal fees, maintenance fees, etc.)?

Perhaps the reliability of your outsourced provider concerns you. Will your provider respect your company’s confidentiality? Will your data and other assets be safe in someone else’s hands? Will your ideas be stolen or will your customers’ sensitive data be hijacked by the people you hire?

What will happen if things go wrong with your provider? Are they happy to share a detailed contingency plan with you so that you can feel assured that you will not be hung out to dry if a serious problem arises?

What level of importance does your provider attach to compliance?

How can you be sure that laws and regulations will be adhered to and that you will not be held liable for infringements?

It’s these kinds of concerns that stop business owners from seeing the many benefits of outsourcing (which would allow their full-time employees to work on the company’s core competencies).

One such owner was Simon Wakefield, Managing Director of green bean coffee importers DRWakefield. His bank was asking some pretty tough questions at the time and he knew he needed help.

“Not having enough background information, data and statistics to lay out for the banks to see what we were doing, we soon realized we needed someone who could manage those and help us make those decisions,” he says.

But at first, he was reluctant to hire an CFO on a part-time basis.

“Part-time was something I’d never have considered before because I like to have people in-house that work with us and understand our business. It sounds simple, but when you start drilling into the way we work with multiple currencies, multiple countries, it becomes quite detailed.

“In my previous experiences of part-time employees, they would come, they would be freelance, they would go and it didn’t work with us.”

He eventually overcame his reluctance to outsource and hired a part-time CFO from The CFO Centre.

“The CFO Centre offered us something: if our first CFO didn’t work out, they would quickly put in another one. If the CFO they installed didn’t have the answer to some information that we needed, he was part of a bigger pool that he could get information from and bring to us.”

Not only did his part-time CFO Nick Thompson help improve his relationship with the bank by bringing in a permanent management accountant to take care of the finances but he also helped update the company’s accounting software packages and credit control procedures, so that it had a far better cash flow than it did beforehand.

“In the five years Nick’s been here, we’ve grown about 30% in numbers. He’s helped bring in new software and changed our auditors so that we have a more professional auditor looking after us now. So there have been very clear targets and goals that have been achieved. From the other side, it’s meant that I can sleep better.”

Any functionality that is not core to your business should be outsourced at the best cost and quality, says Kevin D. Johnson, author of The Entrepreneur Mind: 100 Essential Beliefs, Characteristics and Habits of Elite Entrepreneurs.³

“In the majority of cases, trying on your own to produce everything that your business needs is unrealistic and highly inefficient,” he says. “If you have believed the negative hype about outsourcing, quickly disabuse yourself of it and implement the process into your business strategy.

“If you’re subscribing to the propaganda and refusing to even consider outsourcing, your competitors are meanwhile outsourcing and working hard to put you out of business.”

Outsourcing is nearly always cheaper, more efficient, and more flexible than hiring in-house staff. The benefits include:

  • Access to expertise that you would otherwise not be able to afford
  • Time savings for you and your in-house staff
  • Opportunity to focus on revenue-boosting areas of your business
  • Lower costs
  • More predictability in costs
  • Maximizing efficiencies
  • Enabling a sharper focus on core competencies
  • Increasing business productivity.

What can be outsourced? Outsourced services can be categorized into the following two groups:

tech services and business process

Technology services

Companies require advanced IT and communication technologies for their regular operations. Rapid changes in the technology sector bring new capabilities to use for companies that need to select the right kind of vendor to get the best technology at the cheapest cost. The following technology services are generally outsourced:

  • Software and applications
  • Infrastructure
  • Telecommunications
  • E-commerce
  • Web security and solutions
  • Web hosting, website designing, development and maintenance
  • Logistics, procurement and supply chain management
  • Research and analysis
  • Product development
  • Legal services
  • Intellectual property research and documentation
  • Tech support
  • Customer help desk functions
  • On-site maintenance
  • Email management
  • Data centre operations
  • Disaster recovery
  • Security management
  • Virus protection
  • Data backup and recovery
  • Wireless support
  • Purchase consulting
  • Network architecture

Business Processes Human Resources

  • Payroll services (including payroll statements, bonuses, commissions, tax payments, etc.)
  • Benefits administration
  • Recruitment
  • Training
  • Expense management
  • Management of travel and employee records (personnel forms, policies, procedures, performance management, etc.)

Finance

  • Managing accounts payable/receivable
  • Bank reconciliation
  • Fixed asset management
  • Cash management
  • Financial reporting
  • Risk management

Customer service

  • Marketing support
  • Technical help
  • Advice or disbursing information
  • Processing sales order entry, claims, loans,
  • applications, credit cards and reconciliation.

How to use outsourcing in your organization You can avoid many of the issues related to hiring and training in-house staff and build a much more agile, flexible and cost efficient business as long as you adopt the right approach.

In fact, enlisting the services of an experienced part-time CFO from The CFO Centre is one example of how outsourcing can add value, increase efficiency and maximize opportunities.

You want your outsource suppliers to possess all the benefits of a high-quality, reliable in-house team but without any of the drawbacks. There are never any firm guarantees of success, but the right approach can prevent major headaches and save you a lot of money.

The key to successful outsourcing is preparation. By understanding what your requirements are and by spending sufficient time during the selection process to ensure that you find suppliers who share your values and will truly add value to your business (rather than becoming an expensive risk) it will usually follow that you will build a highly efficient outsourced team.

The main reasons companies don’t outsource:

  • Reluctance to lose control and flexibility
  • A given function is too critical to outsource
  • Anticipated adverse reaction by customers
  • Employee resistance

Outsource To Free Up Your Time And Save Money

 

7 Keys to Profitable Growth

Published: by bethfarnham
7 Keys to Profitable Growth

Planning for growth is something every business owner will say they do, but not all business owners will do this effectively and with a focus that will generate profitable growth.

Many businesses plan for growth, but not profitable growth.  Some businesses focus on growing sales without a focus on margins while others build infrastructures to support sales and growth that never materialize.

Michael Porter said, “If your goal is anything but profitability – if it’s to be big, or to grow fast, or to become a technology leader – you’ll hit problems.”

A business must focus on profitable, scalable and sustainable activities if it is to grow. Profit and the generation of cash to re-invest in your business must be made a priority, as it is an essential part of the financial strategy and structure of a successful business.  Profit and a clear business plan will create a focus and the alignment of the organization, as well as attract investors and other sources of funds to fuel growth – all of which impacts the underlying business value of the business.

The CFO Centre has identified 7 Keys to Profitable Growth:

  1. Define your business goals & objectives
    Produce a formal plan from which you can articulate a vision
  2. Critically review your business
    Identify competitive advantage, scalability & sustainability
  3. Establish a financial plan
    Identify milestones, KPIs & dashboards
  4. Create organizational alignment
    Nurture your culture, hire the right people & communicate the vision
  5. Identify the financial resources required
  6. Support the business with systems & processes to optimize performance
  7. Measure, review, evaluate & course correct
    Be proactive & prepared to be reactive

If you follow these 7 Keys and plan for profitable growth, you will ultimately:

  1. Improve and grow profits
  2. Maximize the scalability of your business
  3. Enhance management team and organizational structure
  4. Attract investors and other sources of funds
  5. Increase business value

To enhance the value of your business and grow successfully, follow the 7 Keys and Plan for Profitable Growth.

How to Scale Your Business for Growth

Published: by charlottenoble
How to Scale Your Business for Growth

To Scale your business depends on two factors: your company’s capability and its capacity to deal with growth.

To scale up your business, your company must be capable of dealing with a growing amount of work or sales and of doing it cost-effectively.

You need to know that your company can achieve exponential growth without costs rising as a result. It’s vital too, that performance doesn’t suffer as your company scales up.

You also need to be sure that your business systems, employees, and infrastructure can accommodate growth. For instance, if you get a sudden surge in orders, will your company be able to cope? Will you be still able to manufacture and deliver products or services on time? Do you have enough employees to deal with a surge in work or sales?

Scaling a business requires careful planning and some funding. To be successful, you’ll need to have the right systems, processes, technology, staff, finance, and even partners in place.

Identify process gaps

Audit your business processes (core processes, support processes, and management processes) to find their strengths and weaknesses. Find the process gaps and address them before you start to scale up.

Keep the processes simple and straightforward. Complex processes slow things down and hinder progress.

Boost sales

Decide what your company needs to do to increase sales. How many new customers will you need to meet your scaled-up goals?

Create a sales growth forecast that details the number of new clients you need, the orders, and the revenue you want to generate.

Examine your existing sales structure and decide if it can generate more sales. Can you increase your flow of leads? Do you need to offer different products or services? Is there an untapped market? Do you have a marketing system to track and manage leads? Is your sales team capable of following up and closing more leads?

Make sure you have enough staff to cope with an increase in sales. If you don’t have enough staff, consider hiring new employees, outsourcing tasks, or finding partners that may be able to handle functions more efficiently than your company.

Forecast costs

Once you’ve done the sales growth forecast, create an expense forecast that includes the new technology, employees, infrastructure and systems you’ll need to be able to handle the new sales orders. The more detailed your cost estimates, the more realistic your plan will be.

Get funding

If you need to hire more staff, install new technology, add facilities or equipment, and create new reporting systems, you’ll need funds. Consider how you will fund the company’s growth.

Make delighting customers a priority

To reach your sales forecasts, your company will need loyal customers. You’ll win their loyalty by delivering outstanding products or services and customer service every time you interact with them.

Invest in technology

Invest in technology that will automate tasks. Automation will bring costs down and make production more efficient.

Ensure that your systems are integrated and work smoothly together.

Ask for help

Don’t be afraid to ask for help from experts who have experience in scaling up companies. In an interview, Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, said, “I’ve never found anybody who didn’t want to help me when I’ve asked them for help.

“I’ve never found anyone who’s said no or hung up the phone when I called – I just asked.

“Most people never pick up the phone and call; most people never ask. And that’s what separates, sometimes, the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You gotta act. And you’ve gotta be willing to fail; you gotta be ready to crash and burn, with people on the phone, with starting a company, with whatever. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.”

Use Management Dashboards to Make Fast Data-Driven Decisions

Published: by charlottenoble
Use Management Dashboards to Make Fast Data-Driven Decisions

The use of management dashboards to monitor management KPIs, metrics and other essential data points will allow you and your management team to make rapid, data-based decisions based on up-to-date information about your business.

A management dashboard provides you with a comprehensive snapshot of the company’s performance. This is critical since it condenses massive amounts of information into a one-page summary that can provide invaluable insight into the health of your company and help with executive decision-making.

It allows you and your managers to access the most relevant information instantly.

The data is represented graphically using tables, line charts, bar charts, sparklines, maps, or gauges so you and other users can see the information at a glance.

They also allow you and other users to drill down to investigate further if necessary.

Types of business dashboards

There are three types of business dashboards:

  • Operational dashboards which emphasise monitoring. These reflect the business processes and help monitor KPIs.
  • Strategic dashboards which emphasise management. They reflect the end status of a KPI or metric for a set period.
  • Tactical dashboards that highlight analysis. They will help you to identify trends and to track how metrics have changed.

Finance dashboard

Your finance dashboard should offer a summary and interpretation of key aspects such as profit and loss, and cash management.

Sales and Marketing dashboard

Your marketing dashboard should provide insight into how successful the company’s marketing efforts are at generating sales and attracting and retaining customers. You should be able to see where people are getting ‘stuck’ in your sales funnel or pipeline.

Risk management dashboard

Your operation and safety dashboard should help you and your team to manage and prevent risk. It could include training and awareness, incident management, claims, compliance, risks for assets and projects, and hazard identification.

HR dashboard

Your HR dashboard should provide reports on internal metrics such as employee satisfaction as well as external metrics such as your company’s success rates for recruitment. Depending on the size of the organisation, it could also be used to track turnover and retention rates.

The benefits of using management dashboards

  • Instant access to core business metrics

Users across your organisation will be able to access core business metrics.

  • Consolidate data from across multiple analytic services

The management dashboard consolidates data from many data points in an organisation to provide one reporting interface. It will save time and effort typically spent on compiling reports, signing into different analytic services and then sharing the data to everyone in the company.

  • Provide real-time updates

Since changes in data or values is reflected in dashboards, you can identify fluctuations in crucial business metrics when they happen rather than having to wait for daily or weekly reports.

  • Align departments

Dashboards can provide metrics that are relevant to each department.

  • Allow root cause analysis

If you spot unusual trends in your summary reports, you can drill down to find their root cause.

  • Communicate and manage strategy

Dashboards can be used as agents to boost organisational change.

How to design the best dashboard

A well-designed dashboard will help improve your company’s productivity and save time, but a badly-designed dashboard will confuse users and challenging to share. It needs to be easy to use and to report the most meaningful data and insights.

That’s why it’s critical that you select the right metrics to display. Avoid the temptation to add as many metrics as you can. If you need to monitor lots of metrics, use dashboard tabs.

Keep the design simple to make it easier for people to read and to digest the information. Avoid using too many colours or fonts or different graphics. Group data in a way that’s relevant and which provides context.

To encourage as broad a range of users as possible, make the dashboard interactive with options to filter and drill down.

Decide the reporting frequency based on the type of dashboard you’re using. For example, structure operational dashboards so they provide daily reports and set up strategic dashboards to give a monthly or quarterly report.

Why and How You Should Scale Up Your Business

Published: by Matthew Booth
Why and How You Should Scale Up Your Business

If you consider what sets companies like eBay, Alibaba, Netflix, Google, Starbucks, Apple, Cisco and Dell apart from other companies, their ability to continuously innovate and create high growth will probably come high on your list.

So should the fact they’ve all successfully transitioned from start up to scale up status without losing their ability to be dynamic and entrepreneurial.

Then there’s the fact they’ve helped create thousands of full-time and part-time jobs throughout the world. Twenty-three-year-old eBay, for example, employs 14,100 full- and part-time employees[1] while Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. has 88,100 full-time employees.[2]

In his book, Scale Up!, the CFO Center’s Chairman Colin Mills defines scale ups as companies which have grown by 20% a year for a minimum of three years and which started the three year period with a minimum of 10 employees.

Scale ups disrupt and revolutionize entire industries, according to a Deloitte & THNK report.[3] “They embody ingenuity, innovation, and foresight,” its authors concluded after studying 400,000 enterprises worldwide.

There’s a common misconception that only start ups can be innovative, dynamic and entrepreneurial. Yet as scale ups like Google and Alibaba illustrate, that’s far from the case.

Perhaps start ups attract more attention because there’s so many of them: it’s estimated that there are 300 million start ups globally.[4] By comparison, only a tiny fraction of start ups ever survive long enough to make the transition to scale up, according to the authors of the Deloitte report.

“Our research shows that the chances of a new enterprise to ascend as a scale up are around 0.5%, which means that only 1 out of 200 surviving new enterprises will become a scale up. ‘Unicorns’ make up the even smaller subset of scale ups; only 104 start ups are valued over $1 billion.”

Those companies that do become scale ups help to boost local, national and international economies. They provide direct, ongoing employment and that, in turn, creates more consumer spending which in turn stimulates the economy and expands the tax base.

Or as business guru and venture capitalist Daniel Isenberg says in Scale Up!, “One venture that grows to 100 people in five years is probably more beneficial to entrepreneurs, shareholders, employees and governments alike, than 50 which stagnate at two years.”[5]

Contrary to what many policymakers believe, start ups don’t help economies to flourish or cause per capita income to rise.

“The relationship between per capita income and entrepreneurial activity is generally negative, rather than positive as is often believed,” wrote Scott Shane, Professor at Case Western Reserve University, in Entrepreneur magazine.[6] He referenced a Gallup Organization survey which compared per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with the fraction of the population that reported being self-employed in 135 countries. It showed that the self-employed fraction had a negative linear relationship with the log of GDP.

“That is, self-employment rates are lower in rich countries than in poor ones.”

But growing a company past the start up phase is not without its share of challenges, whether they are related to employees, sales and marketing, operations, administration, or finance. Most importantly, if growing companies don’t have the right infrastructure to support their expanded operations, those challenges can become increasingly severe.

“While on paper, they may have the revenue, the manufacturing base or customer reach of a substantial business, the culture, the controls, the processes, the personnel and the leadership remain those of a much smaller business that they were a short time before,” says Mills in Scale Up!.

“Worse, they haven’t yet accumulated the resources to build and maintain that infrastructure.”

If the situation is not resolved, the business will outrun itself (cash reserves will dwindle as it tries to meet the expanded demands) or get stuck (as the owner and employees find themselves unable to cope with the problems).

But if you revise your business model, you can overcome these challenges or even avoid them altogether.

“You need to consider your whole business model, because if you have a terrible business model, then the last thing you want to do is to start scaling it,” says Mills.

The CFO Centre’s part-time CFOs help clients revise their business model using a framework known as the ’12 Box’ approach.

It has three levels:

  1. Operational
  2. Strategic
  3. Business Support

Operational

This refers to finance operations and focuses on two key aspects: cash and profitability. There are four boxes: Cash Flow Management and Profit Improvement (which generate money), and Internal Systems and Reporting (which generate time for management).

Strategic

This involves your finance strategy: how are you going to finance the business to achieve future cash and profits? The four boxes in this section cover: Risk Assessment, Strategic Funding, Strategic Activities and Exit Planning, and an Implementation Timetable.

Business Support

This involves crucial tasks such as compliance, tax planning and legal issues, banking relationships and outsourcing. In the case of The CFO Centre’s CFOs they don’t carry out the tasks but instead, manage the work on a client’s behalf. They’ve built relationships with the right people in each country where they operate so that they can connect clients with the right supplier at the right cost when they need it, and then manage the work on their behalf.

Take the F Score: Find Your Future Challenge Areas

To help you identify which one of these 12 areas is a potential current or future pain point for your business, the CFO Center has created a quick assessment form known as the ‘F Score’. (It will only take nine minutes to complete.)

The F Score features a series of questions built around the 12 Boxes, designed to identify your areas of strength and those which represent a gap. When you’ve completed the questions, you’ll receive an eight-page report which will reveal your current or future challenges. It will not only rate the performance of your company’s finance function but also uncover untapped opportunities for non-linear growth.

To discover how the CFO Center will help your company to scale up, please call us now on 800 919 4022 or contact us here.

Free 1-1 Finance Session

Do you have a burning question about any of the following:

  • Cash flow management
  • Funding
  • Profit improvement
  • Exit planning
  • Reporting
  • Getting the most from your bank?

Book now for your complimentary 30-minute finance breakthrough session with one of our part-time CFOs. Get the answers you need to scale up your business.

Ask the CFO

If you’ve got just one finance-related question and you’d like us to send it across to our team of top CFOs, please let us know, and we’ll get back to you within 24 hours.

[1] ‘EBAY-Number of Employees’, Macro Axis, www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/EBAY–Number-of-Employees
[2] ‘Number of full-time Alphabet employees from 2007 to 2017’, Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-time-google-employees/
[3] ‘SCALE-UP: THE EXPERIENCE GAME’, van Dijik, Menno (THNK), Kruit, Jan Dirk (THNK), Mogenddorff, Gideon, Mogendorff, Scheper, Wim (Deloitte), THNK & Deloitte, July 2015
[4] ‘What Startups Need To Scale Up’, Gaskell, Adi, Forbes, www.forbes.com, May 30, 2018
[5] ‘Scale Up! How to Take Your Business to The Next Level Without Losing Control and Running Out of Cash’, Mills, Colin, BrightFlame Books, www.brightflamebooks.com, 2016
[6] ‘Entrepreneurship Doesn’t Cause Per-Capita Income Growth’, Shane, Scott, Entrepreneur, www.entrepreneur.com, September 23, 2014