At Asperity, we have a monthly Lunchtime Learning session. 100-odd Asperity staffers in a room, bring your own lunch for a (hopefully interesting) talk about business. This Thursday, I’m doing the story of Asperity’s £25.5m sale to Inflexion Private equity. It’s called “Red Wine, Fancy Dinners & 680 signatures”. I wish it was as easy as that title suggests!
Your business is under threat. Not just from competition, but from somewhere you may not have thought of - from complexity. All businesses are threatened by complexity and it is an evil that is worse than your most effective competitor.
I’ve spent most of the last two weeks working on business training with our team in Australia and one of the things I cover is about price and value. If you’re a retailer than you’ll try to price as low as possible to get a lead on your retail competitors. But if you’re actually the producer of a product or service then it’s a classic business mistake to price your product or service based on the input costs plus a margin. It results in a number that is unrelated to the value your product or service creates for the buyer, and that value is the only thing that is really important. 
I sometimes use the example of a bunch of flowers here, just to prove a point by showing an extreme. I show a picture of two identical bunches of flowers. The bunch on the left is called “Bunch of flowers - $59.99”, the bunch on the right is called “Wedding bouquet - $139.99”. It’s an extreme example of showing the impact of the situation in the buyers apportionment of value. In the wedding example, all of the emotion and love wrapped up in the event and the day causes us to put crazy valuations on things that are not that different from something we would buy normally at a much lower price. You see this a lot in hotels and the service industry.One of the hardest things to learn when you’re making decisions is when to follow advice and when to ignore it.
It’s even more difficult when you’re meeting lots of brilliant successful people; there’s so much wisdom and experience flying around that you feel you ought to listen to everyone. But just because you respect some one for having a great business career doesn’t mean you have to listen to everything they say
A couple of years ago, when Asperity were thinking about introducing an employee share scheme, a well-respected mentor of mine advised me that it was a really bad idea in his experience. He was quite unequivocal in cautioning me against it, believing that it was loads of work for not much return. Not only that but allocating a huge chunk of the business costs a lot of money, and his feeling was that his staff just didn’t value it at all.
In retrospect, I know it’s because so much time goes in to the legal side of setting an employee share scheme up that communicating the value to employees is almost an afterthought. Everyone gets briefed, the documents get signed and then it’s so much of a relief that the hard part’s over that it can just get forgotten about.
What you end up with is staff that have got a vague idea that they’ve got some shares in the company, but can’t see the share prices on the stock market so have got no idea what those shares are really worth.
I thought, if I can convey the real, tangible value of these shares to our staff, then it will be a worthwhile investment in terms of time and money. But we’re going to have to work really hard to do that.
Against all advice, from my mentors, financial advisors, the works - it was made very clear that it was a bad idea to publish an indicative share price. I’d planned to update all our employees on what we thought their shares might be worth at every Quarterly Business Update, based on our business model and predictions. The consensus seemed to be that I must be mad - to unveil profit numbers when our predictions could be wrong would be a complete disaster.
I thought, hang on a minute - what’s actually important in all this? If your staff don’t believe in the value of what you’ve given them then you might as well not have given them anything at all. We wanted our staff to understand that the piece of paper could turn into a tangible reward. One reason to do it was to connect them to the business, to make sure they work that extra bit harder and go the extra mile.
So we took all of our staff off-site to a hotel just outside London, and we announced the introduction of the employee share program. We told them that at some point over the next three years we were hoping to find an investor to buy part of the company and that they would receive money for their shares. We made it clear that this was something to be excited about, not concerned. We went through what it would be like to be bought by a trader, what it would be like to be bought by private equity, and made sure every department knew what they had to do to contribute to make that valuation high.
And it worked. Everyone understood it. No one panicked, no one went running. And as it turned out, we didn’t sell two years later for seven times the current share valuation, we sold six months later for something like fifteen or sixteen times that amount. Subsequently, we shared just over a million pounds between our employees and only three people left the company in the following year out of a hundred staff. So overall - it worked out a lot better for the business that I didn’t listen to any advice.
I’ve come to the realisation that advice can be really helpful, but it’s just a product of one person’s experience. If it didn’t quite work out for one person, it doesn’t mean it never will. You’ve got to look at the facts and make your own decision for what’s right for the business, on your terms. Ultimately, if you ask lots of questions and find out what went wrong, you can think - how can I do it better? And if you get it wrong, don’t worry just be honest and fix it.
