T he current business cycle has likely impacted many aspects your
business. Retirement, succession planning, exit strategies that all made sense
a few years ago do not seem to fit as well as they did when you envisioned the
future. Discussing the soft (emotional) issues and the hard (business) issues,
this forum will offer guidance in evaluating the health of our businesses.
Learning to identify the issues early allows you to be proactive and address them
on our own terms, before they escalate and become more serious.
Companies fall into one of three categories; healthy,
distressed and somewhere in the middle. This forum will help attendees understand
where they are on this spectrum and how to better understand what (objectively)
a healthy or distressed company looks like. Much like physi­cal well being, the
key is helping the healthy realize and maintain their good habits and helping
the ill identify their symptoms and understand the underlying causes. e will
discuss this spectrum of health and what steps a company can do to improve
their situa­tion as well as when and how planning needs to be adjusted due to
changing conditions.
Key take-aways:
What steps should a business leader take to address many of the
issues but needs help with the really hard ones, such as:
a.       
As CEO, are you willing to address problems with key
family members?
b.      
As CEO, when cash is tight, are you willing to
negotiate hard with the vendors/creditors who have supported you for all these
years?
c.       
As CEO, are you willing to fairly measure the depth of
changes that may be required?
d.      
Do you have believable numbers/metrics to base your
decisions on?
e.      
Are you measuring trends or static numbers? Are you on
a slippery slope heading for trouble?
2.    
What are the issues that are the most challeng­ing based both
emotional and business related scenarios.
A self-diagnosis the health of your own business. This consists of
85 questions designed to highlight areas of current/potential problems that
will enable the members to use real data to begin to set a path of good health
and sustainability going forward.
  About
the presenter - Dave Sands of Dorset Partners ( www.dorsetpartners.com/ )
Dave
has more than 35 years of hands-on experience in senior management.  He
gained Turnaround experience as an operational/productivity consultant in such
diverse areas as hospital restructuring/consolidation, retail, service
industries and small to medium sized manufacturing.  Dave’s
entrepreneurial background includes the startup of multiple companies, one of
which was a domestic manufacturing business with over 250 employees selling
nationwide.
Currently Dave and his wife Jill run a national design studio and
with his son Jeff run Dorset Partners, a professional Turnaround/Restructuring
firm. Previously as CEO/Founder of a $25,000,000 company; Dave’s wife,
son, daughter and son-in-law all worked for the company.  He successfully
negotiated multi-year credit lines, domestic and international vendor terms and
was responsible for all banking relationships.  Having fallen victim to
Hurricane Katrina he also unfortunately experienced first hand the turnaround,
bank workout and bankruptcy process; all from the client’s point-of-view.
Dave graduated from Syracuse Univ. with a major in
Advertising/Marketing.  He also completed graduate studies in Finance,
M&A and Business Administration from Syracuse, Case Western Reserve and
Hofstra.  He has served on numerous private company Boards, community
Boards and the Board of the Tulane Family Business Forum.