ClarityBV Blog

Following the lead of the great professional services thinker David Maister, we’re taking a blogging break.

As Seth Godin observed years ago, beware the CEO (or corporate) blog! While the benefits can be great, so is the time and effort required. An English proverb sums it well, “Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference!”

We’ll see you again when we’re able to meet at least four of the factors that Seth believes make a blog work:

• Candor
• Urgency
• Timeliness
• Pithiness and
• Controversy
• (maybe Utility if you want six).

Thanks to BVWire News for the link on their sidebar! Reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to do for a while – highlight some of the other business valuation bloggers out there. Here are a few of the business valuation blogs I read regularly:

• BVWire News (http://www.bvwirenews.com/) – Frequent updates on a broad range of business valuation topics.
• BW Price’s Marketing U (http://bwprice.blogs.com/marketingu/) – Insights on professional services marketing from the CMO of Mercer Capital.
• CPA.Net Blog by Mark Dietrich (http://cpanet.typepad.com/cpanet/) – Irregular updates focused on health care valuation issues.
• IBA News (http://www.go-iba.org/news/) – Great “hands-on” topics and advice for the valuation practitioner by Rand Curtiss.
• Musings on Markets by Aswath Damodaran (http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/) – Observations on international markets, risk premiums, and current events.
• peHUB (http://www.pehub.com/) – Daily roundup of private equity happenings.

I’m sure there are plenty I’ve missed. What BV blogs do you follow?

If Brian Sittley keeps this up, I’m just going to have to start republishing his feed here… Congratulations to the PSSI blog for being featured on the front page of WordPress.com! I’m privileged to participate in a business improvement group forum with Brian (great name too), and appreciate his insights on business and life. Don’t let the business acumen and ERP talk fool you, Brian also was an English major! He makes blogging and writing look incredibly easy with his talents and experience.

As an avid reader, following lots of blogs is fun for me. But, does blogging make sense as a business development tool? Are twitter, facebook, linkedin, et al. killing the blog just like the web is killing paper publishing? Maybe these things actually increase the value of a blog?

Since everyone is still figuring this stuff out on the fly, put me squarely on the fence. Most of our website visitors come in the “front door” and never visit this blog. On the other hand, the blog is great at generating traffic from Google search. We just need to get better at figuring out what to do with these two different types of visitors. I’ve added HubSpot to my business wish list, since it seems like they have great tools for this stuff.

Yes, I know this topic is not new. But, there must be a reason it continues to generate so much interest…

What is “clarity”?

Clarity: Free from obscurity and easy to understand; the comprehensibility of clear expression.

Why use clarity in the name of our business?

The concept of clarity resonated with me in two major ways.

1. Having a clear sense of direction and focus to start and run a business.
2. A goal to make the valuation process straightforward and transparent.

There is no perfect valuation formula. Experience, intuition, and judgment are an intrinsic part of the process. We try to add value by stating the facts and summarizing judgment calls as clearly as possible.

Many “sages” have noted that it is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong. Uncertainty is inherent in valuation. So, we try to avoid the traps of false precision or of needless complexity.

Confession: Since I like to string together long complex sentences, tools such as “reading ease” and “grade level” are a big help. This post has a reading ease of 57.0 and a grade level of 8.1, according to a popular word processing program. Our last valuation report had a reading ease of 26.4 and a grade level of 14.1, including every footnote, technical definition, etc. How low can we go on grade level? Don’t know yet, but we’ll keep working to find out…