Dragons' Den man and co-CEO to work for FREE at loss-making Outsourcery Outsourcery bosses Piers Linney and Simon Newton are relinquishing their salaries for the next 12 months in a bid to save the loss-making cloudy biz £500,000, the company told the stock market today. The desperate duo’s act is part of measures to find £4.5m in funds to keep the wolves from the door in the medium term, a move …
Why is this even still legal?
The only thing wrong here is that shareholders have permitted such salaries to harm the business, but the real issue for this company is that it is a "me too" in a market with many, many competitors. It has no real USP as far as I can see, so it ends up competing on margin. That's already a fight for an established business, it's lethal for a startup as it becomes way too vulnerable to market movement.
Without commenting on Outsourcery in particular as I nothing about them.
One legal way of making money as an "entrepreneur", if you can talk the hind leg off a donkey, is to get load of other people's money invested in your company as equity and pay yourself a s**t-load of money as a wage while systematically destroying shareholder value burning through the cash pile. When they've got deep losses in the game ask for more cash and tell them "Just 1 more year". In the dot com boom, when I was a poor wage slave, I worked for a US company that was taken over by a company ran by a celebrity multi-millionaire 30-something MIT graduate CEO who had never ran a company that made a profit. He took over our company as it had a cash pile. At the point of the take over all the execs paid themselves multi-million pound bonuses from the reserves for negotiating the deal. Then proceeded to burn through what was left and then "down-sized".
Peter Jones would give him a no-bullshit dress down
Only with the benefit of hindsight - in my experience, Peter Jones is not as good at spotting a winner as he makes out to be. He strikes me more as a banker: willing to lend you money if you can prove you don't actually need it.
what product I could plug to get onto Dragons' Den, if only to ask him about his business 'acumen'. But then they'd just cut that bit out....
Though I do seem to recall one episode where he castigated someone for not having an 'exit strategy'. Nothing like building a business for the long term.
Piers (who it seems is called Jonathan actually) has or has had close on 60 directorships in the UK, but only 10 active at the moment, some in liquidation. Aside from Outsourcery which as discussed above is in a bit of a state, he doesn't appear to have much going on... It's also interesting that his previous directorships are far and wide spread... He was involved in a company that made candles, one that did pizzas, film production, property, telecoms... This may be the definition of entrepreneur, though it's odd that the vast majority are no longer trading, but Outsourcery looks as much like an attempt to jump on a bandwagon and target the public sector as it does anything strategic building on his experiences.
Perhaps they just don't really know what they're doing?
Perhaps they just don't really know what they're doing? ... APJ
Perhaps, but surely serial bullshitters always know what they are doing unless they are delusional, although selling bullshit has and is always going to be a loss leader which only the ignorant and arrogant tool of a fool pumps and buys into, which must have one concluding such punters have no smarts. And there be no shortage of those in the ponzi markets trying to make a quick buck at the expense of others. And how crazy of media to have them as their little darlings on pay to view audio-visual gaming of the system.
The lunatics in charge of the asylum? Yes, well, one knows how disastrously well that always ends for the inmates.Take a look around yourself in your own little worlds. Everything fine and rosy? No problems or worries? Is COBRA sorting everything out for you too? :-)
The bet laid here is …. No Way,they haven’t a clue what to do in everyone’s best interests for the games they be playing are corrupted and rigged and … the truth that they be not telling the mainstream, is that their games are cracked and hacked into by unnatural virtual forces with immaculately resourced assets they do not know, and have zero command and control over.
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. … Donald Rumsfeld
Amen. And have a nice day.
If this is true;
Outsourcery has approved the grant of new options to the joint CEOs over an aggregate of more than 2.7 million shares under the existing long term incentive plan at an exercise price of one pence with a 12-month vesting prior to this.
1 year from now they will vest and funnily enough at the current issue price is about the value of the salary they have sacrificed. Not really a sacrifice more of a punt.
Outsourcery have actually been around for quite some time and were quite ahead of their time selling hosted Exchange, Lync, CRM etc. The problem is that Microsoft then created Office 365 and completely shafted the hosting partner market. The platform is also built on the multi tenant versions which MS are discontinuing so they will run into all sorts of issues. The SPLA licenses to run the software cost more than the actual service on office 365 and they have no additional value add. I seriously cannot see them turning things around.
Cloud computing based in the UK jurisdiction, no one outside of the UK would use it. Thanks to GCHQ global *ponder* I was going to say peeping toms, but outright perverts would probably be more appropriate. I suppose that the UK is a big enough market to service itself and no one else, and still screw the customer to the wall :)
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