Make the management's day-job easier; they cannot miss a number.
principle — attributed to Joanna Stone Herman
Stone Herman's empathy for sellers is operational. The sale process does not pause the CEO's day job. The management team still has to run the business and deliver results. If anything, pressure to perform increases during a sale because buyers are watching every quarter. The advisor's discipline is to make the sale-process involvement as easy as possible and to think ahead about what the team is going to face in the next month of operations. We know this is coming up, can we be helpful thinking through it. The principle inverts the typical advisor posture, which treats the engagement as the primary work. Stone Herman's version treats the engagement as a supplement to a CEO whose actual job has just doubled.
For M&A advisors and bankers running sell-side engagements. The principle is most useful as a corrective when the advisor's workload is being treated as the primary calendar pressure rather than the client's.
dual-burden, day-job, running-the-business, advisor-empathy