Scott Gelbard's Blogger

Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures Every private business owner I know can tell you their EBITDA. Most can tell you their revenue multiple. Fewer can tell you — with any real precision — what their business is actually worth. Not because they don't care, but because the number on a financial statement captures only part of the story. Often the smaller part. In more than 25 years of advising founders, family enterprises, and mid-market companies on strategy and capital, I've sat on both sides of enough transactions to understand something that most valuation frameworks don't fully account for: the most valuable things in a private business are almost never the ones that appear in the financials. Why Standard Valuation Misses the Point Traditional business valuation methods — discounted cash flow, EBITDA multiples, asset-based approaches — are useful starting points. They're not endpoints. They measure what's meas...

Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures There's a version of business consulting that works like this: a firm sends a team, the team interviews stakeholders, produces a deck, presents findings, and leaves. The client is sometimes wiser for it. The deck sometimes collects dust. The gap between insight and execution — the most expensive gap in business — remains exactly as wide as it was before the engagement started. I've spent over 25 years building a practice that operates on a different model. Not because I had a philosophical objection to decks, but because I kept watching good analysis fail to translate into good outcomes. And over time, I came to believe that the reason wasn't the quality of the thinking. It was the absence of integration. What Integration Actually Means When I use the word integrator, I mean something specific. An integrator doesn't just diagnose a problem and hand the diagnosis to the client — the...

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures Over the course of twenty-five years advising businesses across North America, Europe, and Asia, I've sat in a lot of rooms. Boardrooms, deal rooms, strategy sessions, and crisis huddles. And I've noticed something that very few business owners ever want to say out loud: the most consequential voices in those rooms are often the ones that belong to people who are not physically present. I'm not talking about ghosts. I'm talking about silent partners — the silent shareholders, the sleeping investors, the passive co-founders, the family members with an ownership stake but no operational role. These are the people who can change the direction of a business, block a transaction, or destabilize years of carefully built momentum, all without ever walking through the front door. The silent partner problem is one of the most underdiagnosed sources of business friction I encounter. And fix...

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures There's a meeting that the best leadership teams I've worked with hold before every major strategic initiative. It's not a planning meeting. It's not a kick-off. It's a failure meeting — and it's the most useful ninety minutes any executive team can spend before committing to a significant course of action. The concept has a formal name in decision science: the pre-mortem. It was developed by psychologist Gary Klein, and it works like this: before you launch the initiative, before you sign the deal, before you make the hire or enter the market or commit the capital, you gather your team and you pose a single question. It's twelve months from now. The initiative has failed. Not stumbled — failed. What happened? Then you let the conversation go where it needs to go. After twenty-five years in business consulting, I can tell you with conviction: this is the exercise tha...