Like traditional debt, mezzanine funds lend out money and in return expect a series of payments with added interest sometime in the future.
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When a visitor comes to a site that has the Google Analytics tracking code installed, Google Analytics captures data via cookies like what kind of traffic it is, where the visitor came from, their browser, screen resolution, country, metro, etc. Campaign tagging allows you to overwrite this data with your own custom variables to get better insight into who this visitor is and why they’re coming to your site.
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To understand why the top private equity firms are like nurseries, we have to listen to Jack Dangermond, famed businessman and environmental scientist who said:
"In a nursery, if you don't take care of those plants, your profits get lost real quickly. You have to weed. You have to water. You have to nurture.”
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If you read our newsletter and weekly update, you’ll quickly learn that we like data, and we like ranking things. Given our approach to middle market portfolio tracking, we set out to rank the top 10 areas to invest in middle market businesses. We’ll call these “high-growth, low-hype” markets, a phrase first coined by the co-founders of Frontier Capital, Richard Maclean and Andrew Lindner. But before we get to ranking, let’s talk briefly about high-growth, low-hype, and the middle market.
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Inbound marketing is a consumer-centric marketing model that focuses on building a lasting brand image and attracting longterm consumers. Instead of forcing information on potential customers (outbound marketing), inbound marketing attracts customers to the firm organically. This shift in ideology from "push" to "pull" marketing tactics allows companies to focus on building and maintaining customer relationships based on a foundation of high-quality content aligned with company values. Inbound marketing, in a sense, is simply a form of customer education.
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It’s fun working with early-stage companies, because every company and every situation is different. Some need to be set up, some are raising angel and venture capital, some need help with general contract negotiation and drafting, and others are on a hiring spree. However, a few things hold true throughout these diverse startup companies. For one, it takes a ton of work to make a new business successful.
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In 1998, just a year after returning to lead the company he founded after a 12-year hiatus, Steve Jobs took the opportunity presented by a MacWorld address to confront Apple’s critics in public. During his appearance, he humorously outlined what he dubbed a “Hierarchy of Skepticism,” in order to make a clever, pre-emptive strike against the criticisms he’d inevitably face next.
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Measuring a business's success can be a difficult task for many entrepreneurs running today's startups. Who or what's to say a business is successful? Does generating revenue mean success? Questions like these can create a lot of sleepless nights for entrepreneurs. However, there are ways to answer these types of introspective questions. Use your business' metrics as a measure of success.
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Not all metrics are created equal. It takes time, effort, and a strong understanding of your business to identify the best metrics to track for your situation. Metrics fall into two categories for most companies: vanity metrics, or actionable metrics (Key Performance Indicators). Today, we are discussing what exactly makes a vanity metric so we can either avoid tracking something of no value, or better yet, turn that metric into a KPI. To start, let's take a look at the definition of vanity.
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