Scott Gelbard's Blogger

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures People talk about bad advice in terms of financial loss. The deal that fell apart. The market entry that failed. The restructuring that made things worse. These are real costs, and they're the ones that show up in post-mortems and legal claims. But in my experience, the most damaging consequences of bad advice aren't the ones you can quantify on a spreadsheet. They're the ones that compound quietly for years before anyone connects them back to their origin. I've been in this business long enough to have seen both sides. I've given advice I later wished I'd qualified differently. I've also been called in to help businesses recover from guidance they received elsewhere that turned out to be spectacularly wrong. What strikes me, every time, is how much more expensive the invisible costs are than the visible ones. The Three Real Costs The first is time. Bad advice typica...

There is a version of the pivot that gets celebrated in business: the scrappy startup that abandons its original product, finds a better idea, and becomes a billion-dollar company. That story gets told a lot. What gets told far less often is the pivot that kills companies not because the new direction was wrong, but because leadership executed the change in a way that destroyed internal trust, scared off investors, and confused the market at exactly the wrong moment. Over 25 years in strategic advisory, I've watched both versions play out. The difference between them almost never comes down to the quality of the strategic insight. It comes down to how the change was communicated, sequenced, and led. The Pivot Is Not the Hard Part Most founders and CEOs I work with can identify when something isn't working. Experienced operators develop a sense for when a business is straining against the wrong model — revenue isn't compounding the way it should, the best salespeople ar...

I've spent a meaningful part of my career working with family businesses. Multigenerational enterprises, founder-built companies, businesses where the boardroom and the dinner table overlap in ways that no org chart can capture. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's this: the conflict that ultimately tests a family business is almost never the one they planned for. Most family business owners have thought about succession. They've thought about what happens when the founder retires. They've maybe put together a shareholders' agreement or a family constitution. These are important — I encourage all of them. But the conflicts that actually do the most damage tend to arrive sideways, from directions nobody anticipated, at moments when the business and the family are both under stress at the same time. Where the Real Fault Lines Are Family business conflict typically falls into a few recurring patterns. Understanding them in advance is the first ste...

A few years ago I sat across from the founder of a mid-size professional services firm. She had a strong client roster, a capable team, and revenues that had grown steadily for a decade. But growth had stalled. New business was harder to close. A competitor had taken two of her best clients in the past year. She wanted to talk about marketing. I asked her a different question: "What do you believe your clients are actually buying when they hire you?" She paused. Then she gave me three different answers in the same sentence. That was the problem. --- **Clarity Is a Competitive Strategy** One of the most underappreciated strategic disciplines in business is the ability to clearly and honestly articulate what you compete on. Not what you aspire to compete on. Not what your website says. What your customers actually experience — and what they would genuinely miss if you disappeared. Most businesses compete on several dimensions simultaneously: price, quality, service, spee...

There's a phrase I've heard from business owners more times than I can count: "The supply chain stuff is my operations team's problem." I understand the instinct. Supply chains are complicated, unglamorous, and largely invisible — until the moment they aren't. And then, suddenly, they're everyone's problem. Over twenty-five years of advising businesses across North America, Europe, and Asia, I've watched supply chain vulnerabilities quietly erode margins, strand inventory, kill client relationships, and — in more than a few cases — push otherwise healthy businesses to the edge. I've also watched a smaller number of business owners do something different. They treated their supply chain not as an operational necessity to be managed cheaply, but as a strategic asset to be built intentionally. The difference in outcomes is not subtle. --- **The Supply Chain Is a Competitive Position** Most business owners think about competitive advantage in...