Talent Acquisition
What does a firm in need of additional talent do in a tight job market? Here’s how one company grew.
Shortly after completing my degree I went to work for a management consulting firm that specialized in helping technology companies with their financing and marketing challenges. Our firm ended up becoming an equity partner in a client I brought in. The client was an engineering consultancy that was evolving into a designer and manufacturer of electrical instruments.
The Profit Returns for a Second Season
I have some really great news.
Season 2 of The Profit with Marcus Lemonis starts on Tuesday Feb 25th, 2014.
Marcus has become a sort of unofficial poster boy for The Tycoon Playbook in that he is an exemplary practitioner of one of the three main ways that tycoons create value in acquisitions. While I enjoy most shows about experts who go into ailing or failing businesses to fix or save them, Marcus’s is the best of the lot in my book.
My long lost bearded twin?
I don’t recall what piqued my curiosity to watch Downton Abbey a few years ago, but I quickly found myself hooked. This is in large part due to all the very likable characters that populate the Downton Abbey universe such as Mrs. O’Brien and Mrs. Patmore. Who wouldn’t want these wonderful women as friends in real life? Then of course there’s Maggie Smith as the Countess Dowager who gets all the best lines. Hers is the role of a lifetime. Then there are the men: Mr. Carson the old school butler, Matthew Crawley, Tom Branson, and last but not least Lord Grantham himself played by Hugh Bonneville for whom I am being mistaken with ever increasing frequency these days.
Hedge Funder vs. Tycoon
It often seems as if everybody wants to be a hedge fund guy these days. If you then ask the wannabes what hedge funders do, you invariably get a vague answer along the lines of “they invest in stuff” or worse, a simple blank stare. Now to be honest, it took me a while to get a handle on what they do. (Note that I didn’t use the word “understand.”) As far as I can make out a hedge fund is basically an unregulated mutual fund for sophisticated high net worth individuals and institutions. This is another way of saying that a hedge fund can invest in almost anything that its management believes it can earn a high “alpha” in. (The alpha is a rate of return above and beyond what one might expect from trading in stocks and bonds the way mere mortals do.)
So basically almost anything goes so long as there is potential for the high returns necessary to attract and keep sophisticated investor capital.
If you’re a fan of Leo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill like I am, you’ll get a laugh out of this clip from SNL with the two actors.
I sure did.
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