Business360 is a network business. We are only as good as the people in the network and we work constantly to find people with strong skills and experience to add to it. Most people that join are happy to let us do the marketing and selling and we’re fine with that – they just do the work we send them.

But sometimes people join that have a very specific skill set or ideas for additional services they want to offer, and by working together – blending that individual’s skills and experience with the wider Business360 network and processes – we can often do much more and much faster.

Here’s a good case in point: Harold, a friend I met way back at the business school HEC in Paris, started working with us a couple of years back. You can read his ClickNwork profile here.

Harold’s focus is finance, particularly special situations such as distressed debt or raising capital through private placements. In light of recent financial dislocations (you may have read about it. The banks hit a rough patch and have been downsizing like someone on a salmonella diet), many banks, hedge funds, boutique operators and others are trying to cope with higher and often more complicated workloads just at the time when headcount is down. To make it worse, revenue streams (assets under management, deal flow, trading volume…) are down too, creating continuing pressure to reduce costs.

After working with us, Harold realized that leveraging our network could be a valuable tool for many financial operators struggling to cope with workloads, and, with our teams in lower-cost locations, there was the chance they could save money too.

So we’ve been talking to some of our hedge fund/banking/buy-out clients about these additional services we can now offer. Where established clients know us through other work it’s usually an easy next step. Click on the image to read more about these financial services:

I was talking to a client the other day who had read my last blog entry (imagine, a reader!) and who pointed out that a bunch of the work they had given us was a direct response to the recession. Recession as demand driver, funny. But it’s true. I went back over the last six months to look at the work we’ve been given that stems directly from the recession, and it’s a bunch, about 20% of what we’ve been doing:

First there’s ongoing tracking work – as the downturn got going a few clients asked to keep tabs on specific issues such as the actions of competitor companies, core sector news etc, so on a daily and weekly basis we’ve been:

- Capturing and distributing articles that look at competitor response to the recession (price movements, packaging changes, cost-cutting drives, marketing campaigns and so on)

- Preparing newsletters that contain summaries of the more significant developments. Most of these are sector specific, so, for instance, one looks at how all the large consumer goods companies are responding

- Writing monthly and quarterly sector reviews that largely summarize the findings of the above two

- Preparing monthly economic reviews that pull together historic and forecast economic data, sometimes with summaries of competitor actions

And then we have a bunch of ad hoc work that roughly groups under these themes:

- Lesson capture – looking at past downturns and pulling out insights that can be applied today – Do companies do better when they acquire during downturns or upswings? Is it better to cut deeply and early or hold out for smaller later cuts? Do innovation and new products pay off better in recessions? What role can messaging alone play as consumers pull back on spending? There’s lots of it, and coming from many angles.

- Impact studies – trying to gauge the changes underway, where they may head and how profound they will be. We’ve done these for a range of sectors – real estate, homebuilders, banking, personal care and food – but they almost always point back to consumer demand and changing consumer attitudes.

- Bankruptcy studies –  looking at different sectors to identify weak players and likely bankruptcy candidates, which we do using things like asset impairment rates, debt maturities,  cash flow analysis, Altman Z-scores, leverage and coverage ratios, bankruptcy ratios, going concern metrics etc.

- Trend analysis – trying to get a sense of how things are evolving, how fast and in what direction. Trends are capricious things and this work is more art than science, so we often back it up with site visits and interviews (for example, we’ve been doing a lot of looking at Japan lately, most recently seeing how companies communicate to consumers fatigued from its lost decade).

- Future views – thinking about how the commercial landscape will change, how attitudes will diverge from previous trends, assessing what consumers will be looking for, judging which players will fold, which will conquer, and so on. It’s sort of reality-based navel gazing.

And here’s a funny thing – the first recession-based work we were given happened over a year ago, in January 2008. Things were fine then (consumer confidence was high, GDP growth strong, unemployment low and so on), but some of our clients were seeing weakness in parts of their business and, interestingly, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) dated the onset of this recession to December 2007, although they didn’t announce it until December 2008. Here’s betting that in the next couple of months we’ll get our first assignment looking at ways of how to profit from an upturn that comes on the heels of a sharp contraction. And that will be a good thing.