Lessons learned 2018?

Another year in the bag for Angel to Exit, and as usual, it's time to review the good and the bad. These would normally be lessons learned, but I am not completely clear that I have learned from many of them...

First the numbers:

Why are these numbers approximate? (~) Because the time frames for when things happen is always in flux. Things do not happen on a month to month clock, and some of these things change over time, and we are not in day-to-day touch with all of them. Most historic companies give us quarterly updates, but some don't communicate nearly as well.

What caused the failures? We found three main issues over the last year - across our whole portfolio:

Creative solutions and old favorites:

I spend a lot of time thinking through potential changes that can help my businesses succeed or improve. And on advisory boards, we do much the same thing, taking advantage of the group and our joint experience to find and vet more approaches more quickly.

But the things that help most in getting through crisis periods tend to be the old favorites. Here is one for each of the failure modes identified above:

In summary

We always hope to learn from our experiences. We hope to share our learnings with you. Our plan going forward is to scale a bit - but to focus on companies with more of the properties we find successful.

Our goal is to help grow companies. We do this by learning from you and helping you learn from us. We hope you enjoy reading our articles and watching our videos and hope that the coming year will be all the more successful for all of us.

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