Productizing your services or asking customers to prepay can be effective ways to obtain the cash your business needs to grow while keeping a tight grip on your equity and avoiding the obligations of a hefty bank loan.

Darden, the owner of the Olive Garden restaurant chain, announced it was acquiring Ruth’s Chris, the legendary American steakhouse, for $715 million, implying a valuation of around one times last year’s annual revenue, or about ten times their adjusted EBITDA for 2022. Not bad for a giant company, but Ruth’s Chris’s value was likely hindered by its lack of recurring revenue.

Transforming a distributor or reseller into a valuable company may seem like a daunting task. Distributors are usually not worth very much, because an acquirer reasons that without a point of differentiation, a distributor is vulnerable to a price war.

The initial impression customers have of your business often influences how much they decide to spend with your company. This is well known, but have you ever considered how first impressions affect the way potential investors value your business? When raising capital, investors’ initial perception of your business significantly impacts their valuation, affecting both the equity you’ll need to give up for growth and the company’s value when selling.

Simply put, innovation is the combination of an inventive process (discovery of new knowledge) and an implementation process (transformation and exploitation of new knowledge) to create new economic or social value for defined stakeholders (Hindle 2015).

Right now, it is time for some of you to turn your company’s attention toward recovery, ensuring that your businesses are ready to thrive for success in the “new normal”. For those of you who have proved to be even more resilient, you may have a number of innovations in your new product pipeline.