Valuation of a company is also based on whether the company has any profit potential. How does a company create profits? what is profits from operations and what is profits from ownership?

Diversification is only possible if you can use your knowledge of your customers, your product  or your production process. Unrelated diversification is prone to failure.

Low barriers to entry Doing what you love? being in denial, even when the numbers are staring you in the face

Mission, vision, steps, actions, positioning, all these words, and still no good strategy. What is a good working definition of strategy?

Before we can determine how to achieve our goals, we need to do a current situation analysis. SWOT may or may not help. We have to break this down by analysing the marketing, production, finance and R&D strategy, seperately and together.

We are generally inwardly focussed, without doing a PESTEL Analysis. If we do not do an structural analysis and a Trend Analysis of the industry, we may end up not seeing the wood from the trees.

How are we performing against our objectives and our competitors.

Are production, marketing and finance working with the same objectives or are they at loggerheads with each other? Find out using the Consistency Tests. These tests have been extracted from Dan Thomas's Business Sense.