The BLN Future of SaaS Discussion Dinner, 26th May, 17.00 start, to be followed by roundtable discussion, cocktails, and dinner from 19:30.

The Business Leaders Network (The BLN) is a national community of entrepreneurs, business leaders and institutional investors involved in building and working with growth businesses. We facilitate peer networking, discover future leaders and stimulate debate about the development of key growth sectors in the UK economy. We help organisations grow – by connecting corporates to sources of innovation, entrepreneurs to investors or partners and investors to high quality entrepreneurs.

BLN events are run across the UK and promote interaction, investment and discussion between the individuals behind the UK’s most active investors, businesses and innovation clusters.

Attendees: We expect approximately 12-16 company CEO’s or founders to be present at the dinner, along with 4-5 active investors. Currently confirmed attendees include CEOs, Chairs, founders of Cognitive Match, Deloitte, Eden Ventures, Fidelity Ventures, Fox IT, Invenias, IRIS Software Group, Nimbus, Nivio, OmPrompt Inc, Pure 360, Salesforce, SEP, SVB, Symantec, Wellington Partners.

We are delighted to be partnering with Kleinwort Benson and Deloitte and on this discussion.

There are many opportunities to attend networking events but we like to think that The BLN events are both high quality and a little different. You can see feedback from previous attendees here.

Places are limited so a prompt response is necessary to be considered for a place.

Also we are always interested in talking to founders, Chairs and CEOs who can contribute actively to the discussion.

The BLN CFO Breakfast Brainstorm (19th May, 8.00-10.30), is a high-level peer-to-peer discussion forum for individuals leading the finance function in some of the UK’s most admired companies.

Approximately 20 attendees, comprising successful CFOs and rising stars will attend under the Chatham House Rule. The programme exists to help CFOs network, learn from each other, share best practice and advance the role of the CFO in high growth companies in a relaxed, entertaining and facilitated environment.

We will be joined, as a guest speaker, by Oscar Jazdowski, a Brit who has spent over 20 years in the US financing young, emerging, venture-backed technology companies where he is currently based in Silicon Valley Bank’s Boston office. Oscar started his career with Bank of Boston in the UK then joined the bank’s High Technology Lending Group. Over the next 13 years, he was involved in financing young emerging, middle market and large corporate, public-traded technology companies and ran Bank of Boston’s Silicon Valley office. Oscar started the East Coast Technology Group of Imperial Bank in 1996 providing debt financing and other financial services to young, emerging, venture-backed companies. After two years running Sand Hill Capital’s operations in Boston , Oscar joined Silicon Valley Bank.

Oscar will speak about the state of debt and equity financing in the US and UK and would be particularly interested to understand the issues that CFOs face in the UK.

Attendees: The BLN CFO Breakfast Brainstorms have already included some of the most experienced public and private company CFOs and FDs in the region including CFO/FD’s from Red Gate Software, NXT plc, nCipher, CSR, Alertme, Xaar, Domino, Owlstone, Zeus, Sphere Medical, PriSmaStar, Atlantic Healthcare and 1spatial amongst others.

The BLN CFO Breakfast Brainstorms have been greeted by CFOs as a welcome and much needed initiative to facilitate the development of the strategic finance function in organisations – as well as offering a nice breakfast and a chance to meet fellow finance professionals.

Supporters: This initiative is supported by BDO and breakfast is provided courtesy of Red Gate Software.

Places are limited and in high demand so a prompt reply is advantageous to secure a place. If you would like to attend, please contact

Producing sales forecasts is often regarded by many people in organisations with suspicion, dread or even contempt. Why is it that so many people across an organisation can view such a critical part of a companies operation in such a negative way? Sales forecasting is a CRITICAL element of a successful business and the bigger the organisation the more important it becomes. Large public companies are expected to match or exceed their forecast on a quarterly basis and if they don’t their share price takes a beating. Effective sales forecasting is symptomatic of the management team’s understanding of the business that they are running.

Why is so much forecasting like this?

There is a a simple reason and a trick that anyone can adopt that leads to more effective forecasting. Fortunately, it is incredibly simple.

Firstly, why is forecasting regarded with such negative thinking? Usually because it is a waste of time for many of those involved in the process which can look a bit like this:

• Collect Sales people and sales managers low ball forecast in vain effort to make hitting targets and accelerating commissions easier. VP Sales/Sales Director compiles and ‘corrects’ sales forecasts subjectively, then reduce total as much as possible in order to make hitting their targets easier.
• Collate CFO takes numbers and increases them as they are too low, marketing are just about to run a new campaign that will make products sell themselves and there are two new products out anyway that the sales team didn’t know about.
• Ignore Manufacturing/Operations ignore forecast as it is too late to do anything about it anyway and will be wrong. Sales people don’t understand why they have provided information that is then ignored.

In a recent blog post around this topic, one CFO was driven to comment that their chief problem was that not only do sales people lie, they lie at ‘different rates’. This makes the job of forecasting impossible for a CFO… The commentator, (who has clearly had some interesting experiences), does not understand that not only are salespeople generally honest, they are surprisingly consistent in their forecasts and their forecasting can be improved relatively easily.

The key to successful forecasting is to make it meaningful, and to give people feedback.

The process should look more like this if it is to work:

• Collect information from all relevant places. Sales teams obviously impact forecasts but you need input from as many sources as possible, depending on the size and complexity of the business, marketing, product management, distributors, manufacturing, inventory and general market analysis all need to be incorporated into a forecast.
• Clean. Any individual’s forecast will be subjective but surprisingly consistent. Sales people will tend to over- or under-judge their pipeline at a relatively predictable rate. Use data from previous forecasts from individuals, compared against actual results, to try to predict inherent biases on an individual level.
• Discuss and drive the business off the forecast. Use the combined forecast to understand and set priorities for the future at a board level. Iterate the forecast at senior level until there is a consensus on the optimal route for the business. What can you do to minimize potential inventory backlog? Are operations geared to delivering the products sales, marketing and product management expect there is a demand for? Make sure that everyone that inputted into the forecast understands their role in making it happen.
• Feedback and recognition. The most important step in the process. Make sure that you track the accuracy of each individual contribution to the forecast over time. More importantly, make sure that everyone involved in forecasting understands how they did. Hold forecasters to account. Measure the accuracy and consistency of their individual forecasting activity. This is a critical part in enabling you to know how much weight to give individual forecasters in the future. More importantly though, by making this analysis available to the contributors, they will improve their ability to forecast in the future.

While the feedback step seems obvious, it is often missed. Without it, a forecast is unlikely to be as useful to the organisation because the individual contributors to it will feel detached from it and will not be able to improve their own contributions. Feedback provides both data for all people contributing  to a forecast that they can use to improve their forecasting ability in the future. More importantly it gives people a heightened sense of ownership of the model.

This blog post was written off the back of our breakfast brainstorm, ‘Sales directors are from Mars, CFOs are from Venus’ held at Red-Gate Software and supported by BDO. CFO breakfast brainstorms are senior level discussion groups for CFOs and Financial Directors of high growth businesses – from venture and private equity backed businesses to AIM and FTSE listed companies.

Looking like Edinburgh Informatics have played a blinder in putting their Engage Invest Exploit 2010 event on 12th May.

With interesting speakers, great companies and probably the strongest roster of  venture capital and corporate investors to be gathered together north of the border for many a year, this is shaping up to be an excellent event. With the added excitement of Techcrunch running their first UK event outside London, this should be a great opportunity to visit an increasingly vibrant part of the UK technology scene.

Congratulations Cisco Systems. According to the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones VentureNews, these are the 10 most acquisitive technology companies over the past decade. (Number of acquisitions in parentheses).

1. Cisco Systems – 48
2. IBM – 35
3. Microsoft – 30
4. EMC Corporation – 25
5. Oracle Corporation – 23
6. Broadcom – 18
7. Symantec – 18
8. HP (Hewlett-Packard) – 18
9. Google – 17
10. Sun Microsystems – 16

Cisco have also been spending a lot of money. Their deals include Arrowpoint Communications, ($5.7 billion, 2000), Scientific Atlanta ($6.9 billion, 2003) and WebEx ($3.2 billion) as well as Starent Networks ($2.9 billion, 2009) and Tandberg (reported $3 billion) in 2009. While this is enough in 2009 to make Cisco one of the primary acquirers by value in 2009, these are the only two deals they completed in 2009.

Bear in mind that these numbers are for a decade. The picture is different for 2009 where some less traditionally ‘tech’ businesses come in like Abbott Laboratories and Amazon.com:

1. Oracle – 5
2. EMC Corporation – 4
3. Thomson Reuters – 3
4. Google – 3
5. IBM – 3
6. CA – 2
7. Barracuda Networks – 2
8. NCR – 2
9. Cisco Systems – 2
10. Texas Instruments – 2
11. Amazon.com – 2
12. Abbott Laboratories – 2
13. BakBone Software – 2
14. Nuance Communications – 2
15. Versata Enterprises – 2
16. Sparxent – 2
17. Informatica – 2
18. Boku – 2
19. Intuit – 2
20. McAfee – 2
21. Medtronic – 2

The public information released by Dow Jones does not give information about the specific deals or the values associated with them which makes seeing what has been missed tedious but there are a couple of implications for entrepreneurs.

• In reality, it is not very common to get bought by a large technology company. Over the course of the first decade of the millenium, over 258 companies were purchased by the 10 most active technology acquirers. That is an average of 26 per year globally. That is not very many acquisitions given there are probably 10,000 startups per year that are basing their exit strategy on an acquisition.
• To be part of the acquired group, you need to have customers, technology or something less tangible that an acquirer REALLY, REALLY, wants.

The List in 10 years from now

It is possible that 2009 shows the start of another trend and it would be fascinating to consider what this list looks like in 10 years time which would be really useful information to have right now.

I would expect to see Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Salesforce figuring as they move into more mature phases of their existences and drive into new markets. These would come, possibly at the expense of Sun (duh), Oracle (will probably need to make fewer bigger acquisitions as it reinvents itself), Symantec (future of cloud computing may have significant implications for the business) and HP.

Of course, like all predictions, others may have a view. Would love to know your thoughts on the Top Ten Tech Acquirers 2020. A bottle of champagne to the most accurate prediction!

We are holding a discussion event for a very small number of ‘super-angels’, to consider how angels can collaborate more effectively – both together and with the venture community. This is a follow on from our original early stage investor summit held in November – details here.

This is a small, invitation-only event for significant, active, investors in early-stage internet focused businesses. The afternoon session, to be held at a central London location, will feature a view from Intel Capital’s Mike Buckley, based  on emerging opportunities in the sector alongside a focused round table discussion designed to facilitate networking, information and deal flow between active investors in the European investment ecosystem.

If you would like to suggest a participant, please contact us directly at events@thebln.com

About Mike Buckley

Mike is Director of Strategic Investments for Intel Capital where his remit is investing in early stage companies that are strategic to Intel’s Digital Home, consumer electronics, digital media and service related efforts. Mr. Buckley also contributes to the development of Intel’s strategies and acquisitions in these areas. Mr. Buckley has been a member of Intel Capital since 1999. Prior to his current investment focus on the digital home, Mr. Buckley also invested in communications components, systems and service companies and directed Intel Capital’s efforts related to Internet infrastructure and services. Prior to joining Intel Capital, Mr. Buckley was a Partner and Vice President at Orca Capital Corporation, a Pacific Northwest-based investment banking firm. At Orca, he led the communications and software practices. Mr. Buckley was also an Associate at Jones Lang LaSalle (formerly LaSalle Partners) where he worked as a real estate investment banker and asset manager. Mike received a B.A. in Quantitative Economics from Stanford University.

Amusing article in the Telegraph about the trials and tribulations of doing business in China.

It follows the story of UK based entrepreneur ‘Chris’ who aims to build and import electric scooters. His two years in the country have not left him feeling very charitable…

‘”Victor is the most dishonest man I have met in my entire life,” says Chris, tersely. “But the problem is that no one takes any direct responsibility. The workers lie to their bosses. The bosses lie to the salesmen, the salesmen are our point of contact, but they don’t know what is going on,” he adds.’

Chris has had such a hard time he has even (almost) considered a UK manufacturing base…

‘”If I had known back then how China works, I would have used a factory in England,” he says wistfully. “Well, maybe not England because it is too expensive, but perhaps Taiwan or Japan. I’m looking at switching production to there for the next batch.””

This is in no way a ‘representative’ sample of entrepreneurs doing business in China, it does make you wonder whether there is any hope for manufacturing in the UK if Chris, despite all his experiences, still wouldn’t consider coming back to the UK.