A Year of Building – The Deal Team in 2019

We beat the odds in 2019. At three years old and thriving, The Deal Team is ahead of the 60% of businesses that fail in the first three years, according to the Telegraph.

This is our annual reflection on the key business lessons learned in 2019 (you can read the 2018 review here, and our first year’s review from 2017 here). As some evidence that the key business lessons I learned during the year might have had concrete results, here are our key achievements

Our Platform Works. Between September 2018 and the end of 2019, five experienced Consultants chose to join the platform and represent The Deal Team for professional transaction management. We give them access to colleagues to share their journey with, systems to support their work, enterprise-level IT, and origination support to help them stay in touch with their career contacts with relevant and thoughtful content. 2020 is already looking promising for Consultant recruitment.

Increased Presence and Products. We received more formal transaction enquiries in 2019 than ever before, in spite of the political and economic factors making it one of the weakest years of the last decade for European investment banking activity. Our product development continues. In 2019, we added High Yield to our existing M&A and ECM delivery capability in response to client demand.

Deeper Thought Leadership and Innovation. Many of our articles and commentaries during the year, including by Consultants, highlighted the less explored company-side aspects of transaction execution – GDPR, a chairman’s IPO checklist, and Direct Listings, to name three. We co-wrote with a leading law firm an article on the new UK IPO regulations. We spoke at a share registrar’s offsite, on employee share plans and corporate events. We rolled out our Practice Manual for transaction execution excellence, documenting the best practice processes, templates and key red flag questions our Consultants ask during their work, to give our clients objective consistency and high quality of execution.

What lessons did I learn from this year? Let me point out that I’m not claiming to have mastered any of these lessons. They are all part of the ongoing process of reflection and improvement. The act of writing this article is itself a reinforcement technique. So, in no particular order:

1. Take care of yourself and your loved ones. There’s a great reason this appears on almost every entrepreneur’s list (and the ones who don’t have it are lying). It’s a marathon, not a sprint. The energy needed to keep your motivation going, day in day out, is immense.

Be kind to yourself, celebrate the wins, give yourself positive goals by planning the rewards for business milestones. Get regular exercise (see Atomic Habits for how to make it automatic). Be present for your loved ones. Show them love and respect, instead of the exhausted, distracted stereotype of a burned out entrepreneur, and you will get love and respect reflected back to you.

2. Be passionate about something completely unrelated. Make it a habit to do things you enjoy that are completely different to the business. From mid 2019, I photographed local landscapes at sunrise most weekends, and every day when on holiday – and produced some of my best images ever. A few hours, once a week, doing something just for myself.

3. Invest in your knowledge of best business practice to apply to your business – and maximise your recall. I read seven business books in 2019. Reading a book once is not enough to make it sink in. I marked every passage of interest. I wrote them up to create chapter summaries. Then extracted key quotes. Then wrote key actionable ideas for my business. Then wrote a one paragraph summary of what the book could teach my business. The books were

Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss (negotiation strategy is a process of uncovering information to maximise your position, not a zero-sum game)

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight (the values Nike’s founder applied to create a brand new market for running shoes)

Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount (the truth about sales prospecting, messaging, getting the client into the buying zone, and closing on the sale)

Atomic Habits by James Clear (the benefits of developing 1% improvements in positive habits, day by day)

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore (the problem of moving a brand new product from early adopters, to widespread market acceptance)

Drive by Daniel Pink (what motivates people both short and long term – also a surprising insight into the brain’s decision making process)

The Referral Engine by John Jantsch (how to get your business to market itself through satisfied customers)

4. Make the changes you need to improve your personal accountability and discipline. My business works from hotdesks in a WeWork office in London. I realised the office I was using wasn't the best solution for the commute, or the usability. I moved to a central London location by Waterloo Station, the easiest commute I could plan. Now, after meetings I head back to the office, instead of bailing and going home.

Having weekly calls with each Consultant, keeps me answerable for short term progress. My business coach tests my delivery on longer term strategy, committing me to delivering on three business goals per quarter. A weekly Default Diary keeps me on top of the vital (and boring but necessary) tasks.

5. The most expensive way of trying to fix something, is to do it yourself. My blinding flash of the obvious came after four months of recruitment through personal referrals, at which point the lead candidate decided on another role. The piece of the business plan that centred on that role was at a total standstill for four months, PLUS the time to reset, and then run a search properly with headhunters. That’s a long, long time. Specific lesson – recruitment is hard work, and the cost of hiring the professionals is tiny versus the opportunity cost of not having that person delivering.

6. Sales is a numbers game. My previous investment banking experience and my first business approach to generating leads, could be summarised as “who is likely to do a deal, let’s go speak to them”. It kind of works when you’re in a large organisation that has multiple conversations with lots of clients on lots of topics, and you get your share of qualified leads falling in your lap. In a small business, especially one with a single high-stakes sale opportunity, that approach is just not scalable beyond a pretty low limit.

My prospecting strategy is now to access the largest number of companies being sold or doing transactions, as efficiently as possible, using the ongoing thought leadership materials as leverage to maximise touch points and deepen our brand recognition. I added referral rewards where possible. I started hiring for the key sales and marketing role which will deliver a classic corporate sales effort – managing the pipe of leads through a robust CRM system, qualifying the prospects through meeting feedback, market intel and objective analysis, and having processes to maintain contact and escalate our efforts when prospects are approaching the buying decision.

Three years in, and we’re better than the average startup. That sounds like something worth celebrating. Fourth year, here we come.