Summary
Midas Managers: How Every Business They Touch Turns to Gold by Rob Slee is the first book that shows managers of private companies how to win in the new economy. This book comes out none too soon. According to Slee, private companies represent most of the U.S. economy, but 75% of these are not increasing in value. Midas Managers' mission is to correct this.
Slee writes that some super-successful business owners called Midas Managers have figured out how to create business wealth. These value creators are made not born, and they share a number of traits, such as: an ability to see "just over the horizon"; a reliance on strategy rather than tactics to achieve goals; stubborn contrarianism; and a capability of understanding and exploiting the behavior of others. It is not Slee's intent to create Midas Managers, as only the battlefields of life and business can do that. Rather, his intent is to share Midas strategies such that they can be copied and used by others.
The book is organized around three topics: Arbitrage, Conceptual Business Models, and Private Finance. Each of these topics is covered in 6-7 "story" chapters. These easy-to-read case studies illustrate how a Midas Manager created and implemented a particular Midas strategy. At the end of each chapter, a "Blueprint" section gives step-by-step instructions which enable the reader to replicate the strategy.
Midas Managers is written for owners, managers and advisors to private companies that want to change the value of the business. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to better compete and create value in the globalized, Conceptual Age.
About the Author
Rob Slee is Managing Director of Robertson & Foley (www.robertsonfoley.com), a middle market investment banking firm.
Rob has published more than one hundred articles on private finance topics in a variety of legal and business journals. Rob's book, Private Capital Markets, was published in mid-2004 by John Wiley & Sons and is now considered the seminal work in finance for private companies. Rob's second book, Midas Managers, describes how super-successful private business owners create substantial wealth in a global economy.
Rob is a board member of numerous professional associations and private companies. He owns equity positions in a variety of mid-sized private businesses. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Miami University, and received a Master's degree from the University of Chicago and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University. Rob can be reached at: rob@robertsonfoley.com
