Utilizing Market Intelligence to Stay Ahead of Competition

Market intelligence is the extroverted partner to business intelligence. Internal indicators about the health of a company’s operations comprise the realm of business intelligence. This may focus on things like aggregate numbers of consumers, active products and product lines, shipment quantities, daily, monthly or yearly sales volumes, supply chains and other business transactions. On the… Read more »

Business Intelligence: The Foundation for Embedded Analytics

With all the detailed information on customers, competitors and business operations that’s being gathered today, companies look to analytics to provide insights into this data. This demand for efficient ways to provide understandable and actionable information has contributed to the development of new software platforms that offer “embedded analytics” to their users. These offerings claim… Read more »

Telling Stories with Business Intelligence

In 1983, Edward Tufte published his groundbreaking book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.  In it, he outlines the importance of visually presenting data and statistics in a way that is easy to understand—beautiful even. His work is widely regarded as foundational to informational design and his methodologies are employed in political science, data analysis… Read more »

Common Causes of M&A Failures

Mergers and Acquisitions are inherently risky business transactions. An estimated 83% of M&As fail to provide shareholder value. Although there are many reasons for this high failure rate, here are a few common causes that thorough due diligence process, thoughtful strategy and responsive can planning address. Inadequate Due Diligence This one might seem obvious, but… Read more »

How Can Well-Informed Market Intelligence Benefit Your Business?

Companies often conduct customer surveys and gather data about competitors to better understand how they are performing and how they can improve. This market research data is useful for evaluating performance and making adjustments aimed at improvement. Market research alone is a contemporaneous snapshot of performance that informs a reactive response to current conditions. Utilizing… Read more »

An Introduction to the Different Types of Due Diligence

The term due diligence broadly refers to all the research done to ensure a deal is legitimate, but there can be many different types of due diligence for different kinds of businesses. Types of Due Diligence Legal One of the most important and most common types of due diligence, legal due diligence examines and reviews… Read more »

5 Types of Employee Misconduct

Employee misconduct should never be treated lightly. Yet, many companies do a poor job of both handling employee misconduct and preventing it. This is largely because both employers and employees do not understand or are unaware of the different types of employee misconduct. Theft and fraud Theft and fraud are some of the most severe… Read more »

How to Successfully Integrate Company Cultures During a Merger

Completing a successful merger is no easy feat, not least because of the challenge of integrating company cultures. No matter which side of the merger you’re on, you’ll probably be working with new people, in new departments with new leadership. You may also have to get used to new brand identities, disrupted workflows, new software… Read more »

These Resume Screening Tips Can Help You Find Great Job Candidates

Qualified job candidates can be hard to find, especially in fields with specialized educational or technical demands. When you’ve got a massive pile of resumes in front of you, it can be tough to sift through them to find the right people. That’s why we’ve put together a few actionable resume-screening tips to help you… Read more »

Evaluate Executives Based on the 4 C’s of Leadership

Investing in a company means much more than just investing in a business plan or a concept—it also means investing in a leadership team. A company’s leadership can make or break its bottom line and ultimate success, which is why it’s important to develop an effective way to evaluate executives. One good method, developed by… Read more »