Sell Sell SellHindsight is 20/20 they say...
When I first bought into this story close to 10 years ago, it was an exciting growth story!
Now, not so much!
Where to start:
- CEO has been there 3 years and has no strategy on what to do whith this business.
- They did a 50 to one consolidation, taking the stock from $.04 to $2; his selective memory usually leaves this out when he is talking to investors about the story; for those of us in the story for awhile know that the actual value is between $.06 - $.08
- He started out saying and doing the right things for example, cutting back the staff from over 100 to the mid 60's; of course to be profitable it needed to get below 50 and there was no strategy to get there.
- Then he thought halting sales for a year would be a good thing; of course this was likely because the the sales leader he hired wasn't performing, as it is never a good idea to halt sales
- Then he hired a sales superstar out of the US, who went on to create over $1m in cost and has not sold anything substantive.
- About a year and 1/2 ago they came up ith a "strategy" to grow the business to $20M by 2020; this was a goal not a strategy and with no underlying strategy to achive the number, it is of no surprise that they are struggling to maintain their revenue number with little to no growth.
So here we are, what could have been a darling in the e-invoicing space is now losing buyers, still has no strategy, the good people are leaving or being managed out, and yet the board does nothing about the CEO.
For those still in the story, here are a few questions you should be asking at the next quarterly call:
- What is your strategy to grow revenue?
- What will the impact on revenue be now that the over $400K per quarter revenue from a one time PS project is done?
- How will you replace the revenue from lost buyers who consolidated and chose the competition's solution?
- How will you replace the revenue from workflow partners who are going direct to the supplier and bypassing Cortex?
- Why did the largest shareholder and board member quit and sell?
I am out of the story and hopefully thise who read this who are still in,
SELL; and those that are not,
stay away!