Andrew Greta's Business Development Blog

The term business development (or “BD”) means different things to different organizations. For human resource departments reluctant to saddle their highly compensated rainmakers with the same moniker employed by encyclopedia peddlers and car lot attendants, BD means “sales” – landing new business from new customers. For others, BD is synonymous with “account management” – generating new and continued business from existing customers. For still others, BD is an amorphous umbrella under which organizational misfits carry out a variety of fuzzy activities from cultivating internal bureaucracies to paying lip service to “strategy” and spending lavish expense accounts under the guise of “relationship building”.

For me and many others in the field, it’s a profession and a discipline charged with driving corporate growth through acquisitions, divestitures, strategic partnerships, and licensing arrangements.

A well-tuned business development function is a powerful engine to drive corporate growth by feeding the sales channel with new business lines, products, services, and distribution channels. BD can also contribute newly acquired or licensed intellectual property to the research and new product development teams.

What BD is NOT about is recklessly "buying growth" and racking up a credenza full Lucite deal trophies that end up ultimately destroying company value. The true BD professional is an advocate for true value creation. A trusted adviser committed to finding solutions to complex problems but also a healthy skeptic of faulty reasoning and value-draining propositions.

In upcoming posts, we’ll dissect the business development process from strategy through target identification, deal origination, valuation, structuring, and negotiations from a practitioner (as opposed to academic) perspective. We’ll explode some of the myths surrounding M&A work using real-world examples in the news today. And we’ll provide a forum for discussion and resource sharing in this exciting field.

Labels: Business Development Basics

posted by Andrew Greta  # 11:31 AM