My old employer gets bought. Here's my thoughts.

Informa's cash offer / whatever (don’t ask me about the specifics) of ₤6.50 per share is the culmination of CEO Mike Danson's 20yr (mas o menos) voyage of stubbornness from a first market report written out of a Kilburn flat to serious money via a stock market floatation and a bunch of acquisitions along the way.

I left London Hospital in 1997 having spent 3 yrs combining a PhD tenure with some bonkers product dev projects with the charismatic NMR stalwart Martin Grootveld. I knew full well I didn’t want to follow a research career in academia so was quite interested to see MarketLine, a then Datamonitor subsid/brand advertising for 'business analysts'. I look back regularly on the first few years with genuine joy along with my actual real, true mates I have from those days whenever we get together, which I'm happy to say is quite frequently. Workwise, (first jobs for all of us) we became self sufficient. We made stuff up if it hadnt been done before (no, not data), we designed, researched, wrote, marketed and sold what we did, because there wasn’t really anyone else.

I'm sad to report that in the last few years, having done quite a bit of recruitment for the tech practice at DM, I noted a significant lack of ability on the part of recent graduates to start with a blank piece of paper and actually come up with ideas, ways to address challenges etc… to quote Steve Martin in LA Story, ''perhaps I'd think the same had I been educated with a banana and an inner tube'' (I don’t really know what that meant either but I've always fancied getting it in somewhere).

To cut a long story short, between 1997 and 2004 I covered (in more or less chrono order) gas companies, process control technologies, enterprise apps, mobility, integration and most vertical markets you can think of including a revisit of the manufacturing space, where the experience I had in the process control space became a nice differentiator for us in the way we explored the market. Taking most of 2005 off to go travelling was a) the best thing I'd ever done at the time and b) pretty much nailed it for me in that I felt it was the perfect time to go somewhere else when I got back… a bunch of dull internal stuff when I returned back, a brief foray into the retail sector and then a chance conversation with Dale Vile as we waited to be let back into our hotel after a severe roof leak closed out the DM career which, in hindsight, was remarkably good fun overall.

I just realised that this could turn into a very long post so I'll start summarising:

Stuff I liked about working at Datamonitor:

• Getting to decide what the best areas were to research.
• Self sufficiency.
• Meeting and talking to people and trying to distill their experience into useful stuff for others to benefit from.
• Making very good friends that I'll have for good.

Stuff I didn’t like about working for Datamonitor

• Lack of priority given to staff training—by that I mean professional training—not made up internal stuff given by untrained staff. I think removing the small, cheap dedicated training function it used to have was a big mistake.
• Lack of senior management ideas and leadership—something that’s been slowly ironed out over the last few years by bringing in external people with more expierience, but poor leadership in certain areas was allowed to remain for far too long, and bred a lot of frustration, mis-trust and general malcontent.

That sums up most things really.

Back to Mike Danson. Famously stubborn, not a bad football player (I am a goalkeeper, Mike a full back so I had the opportunity to scream at my CEO occasionally) and to me at least, always friendly and approachable. I know everyone would'nt say that though, so perhaps I got lucky. Like him or Datamonitor or not, what anyone interested in growing a business should appreciate is that end to end, he delivered rather well. If some of the middle parts are either there to emulate or avoid, either way, there's something to take away from any angle.

Thought I'd be harsher or bitter? (you can find some other end of spectrum views on DM quite easily, but I'm not interested in replicating those here though) Nope. Life's too short. Do I speak for everyone? Certainly not. That was my (abridged) story, no-one else's.
Disclaimer: I own shares.