Scott Gelbard's Blogger

Over the past several years, I've watched otherwise well-run businesses come within inches of failure — not because of a bad strategy or a market that moved against them, but because they had no plan for when something unexpected went wrong. A supply disruption. A key person departure. A cyberattack. A government policy shift in a foreign market. The event itself was almost never the real problem. The real problem was that no one had thought through what would happen next. Operational resilience has quietly become one of the defining competitive advantages of the 2020s. The companies I work with that have built it into their DNA have consistently outperformed their peers when the environment gets difficult. And in international business, the environment always gets difficult eventually. What Resilience Actually Means — And What It Doesn't Resilience is not about being conservative. I want to be clear about that because I see too many business owners conflate the two. Bei...

Most business owners think about capital relationships backwards. They think about capital when they need it. They prepare a pitch when a raise is imminent. They call an investor when there's a deal on the table. And then they are surprised — and sometimes blindsided — when those conversations don't go the way they expected, or when the capital they counted on isn't there when the moment arrives. I've watched this play out dozens of times across 25 years of advising founders, family enterprises, and growing businesses across three continents. And I've come to believe that the single most important thing a business owner can do to improve their long-term access to capital has nothing to do with their pitch, their deck, or their financials. It's building relationships with capital providers long before they ever need them. This is not a novel observation. Every experienced founder has heard some version of "build relationships before you need them." B...

Early in my career, I watched a deal fall apart that had no business falling apart. The numbers worked. The strategic rationale was sound. Both parties genuinely wanted to reach an agreement. The legal teams had done their work. And yet, in a single meeting — a dinner, of all things — something broke. Not the terms. Not the economics. Something subtler and more permanent: trust. One party walked away feeling disrespected. The other was baffled about why. Neither could fully articulate what had happened. The deal died not because of strategy or finance, but because two highly capable groups of people were operating on different cultural operating systems — and nobody in the room was fluent in both. I've thought about that dinner many times over 25 years of cross-border work across North America, Europe, and Asia. It's the moment that convinced me that the most underrated skill in international business is not language. It's not technical expertise. It's cultural trans...

There is a moment in nearly every engagement I take on when I sit across from a founder or owner-operator and ask a simple question: "What would have to be true for your business model to stop working?" The pause that follows tells me everything. Not because they don't have an answer — most experienced operators have at least a partial one. The pause reveals something more important: how recently they've actually thought about it. In more cases than I'd like to admit, the honest answer is that the question hasn't been asked seriously in years. The business has been running. Revenue has been growing. The model that worked in 2018 or 2021 is still the model today. And that assumption — that what worked before will continue to work — is precisely where the vulnerability lives. After 25 years of advising businesses across North America, Europe, and Asia, I've come to believe that deliberate, periodic stress-testing of your own business model is one of the h...

Early in my career, I was preparing for a significant negotiation on behalf of a client — a cross-border acquisition that would be transformative for his business if structured correctly. We had done all the standard preparation. Financial models, valuation ranges, deal structure scenarios, walk-away thresholds. I thought we were ready. We were not. What I did not know — and what became apparent within the first twenty minutes of the opening session — was that the lead negotiator on the other side had recently come under pressure from his own board to close a deal quickly. He was not negotiating from strength. He was negotiating from urgency. Had I known that beforehand, everything about our approach would have been different. That experience taught me a lesson I have never forgotten: the most important preparation you can do before any significant business engagement is not about your own position. It is about understanding the person across the table. I call this counterparty int...

I have sat across from some of the most capable business builders I have ever met and watched them make decisions that did not make sense on paper. They turned down capital they needed. They micromanaged teams that did not need managing. They stalled strategic moves that should have been obvious. And when I probed carefully — the way a long-term advisor learns to probe — I often found the same thing underneath. The business had outgrown them. Not in capability. Not in intelligence. In identity. There is a version of the scaling challenge that gets talked about constantly in business circles — the operational version. You have to build processes, hire leaders, put systems in place, stop being the one who does everything. That conversation is real and important. But there is another version that almost nobody discusses, and in my experience, it is the more dangerous one: the moment when a founder's sense of self becomes an obstacle to the growth of the company they built. The Iden...