During a media interview today, an experienced private equity firm partner made a prediction about when we’ll see deals begin to happen again. In a nutshell, the current market has public valuations down approximately 50% and sellers won’t sell for today’s market prices. So M&A isn’t happening. But this investor believes that the more companies trade at these levels, the more sellers will realize it’s necessary to sell at this level. He based his prediction on his experience doing deals in the software industry during the tech bubble in early 2000 which resulted in a “dramatic reset”…
• Software industry had a reset in 2000-2002, similar to the reset we’ve seen;
• After the March 2000 market crash very few deals took place for nearly two years;
• Not until the latter half of 2002 did the deal stream really begin to pick up and then it grew from 2003 - 2007. 

So according to this, if Q4 2007 was our breaking point to start this “reset”, deals should begin to pick up again in 2010.

Public relations used to be the practice of approaching the traditional media to garner third party endorsements for our clients.  These endorsements were valued by our client’s customers and their sales rose as a result.

Today, with many traditional media shutting down or moving to the internet, public relations messages placed on the web have the ability to drive a client’s sales as well as attract articles.  This is an amazing leap forward in the value of public relations. 

Driving a client’s sales on the web means pushing the client’s name up to the number one or two slot on search engines.  At LANE PR we are now as focused on a client’s search results as we are on the quantity of clips that we garner for them. 

We implement social media campaigns and drive search rankings by optimizing all of the usual public relations tools - press releases, white papers, media kits, etc.  Additionally, we are now responsible for our client’s news rooms and monitoring their search rankings and Google Analytics accounts.  Bringing these tools under our responsibility allows us to effectively monitor the results of our public relations efforts.   Public relations can now accomplish organically what pay-for-click attempts to do.  

I started LANE PR in 1990 as a public relations agency with the belief that PR was the most cost effective tool to increase sales and grow value for our clients.  Now with the advent of new media, this statement holds more weight than ever.

We’ve heard a lot about sustainable building and LEED certification, but how do you get the funding to turn well-meaning ideas into reality? One of our clients, Umpqua Bank, worked with Energy Trust of Oregon to create an innovative new lending program that’s filling this gap. Called GreenStreet Lending, it offers financing options designed to help small businesses and homeowners manage rising energy costs by making it easier to invest in energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. What better way to spur economic growth than with green-building projects?

People are cutting back financially wherever they can. It’s gotten so bad according to a survey released this week that people may even revise their cell phone plans and cut out mobile internet access.

Survey finds:
• About 19 million Americans, or one in five cell phone users with extras, have considered cutting back on extras or have already, while 41% of cell phone users said it is very likely or somewhat likely that they will cut down on extras if the economy worsens.

And it’s not just all talk…
• 8,740,000 Americans — that is 19% of consumers with a cell phone — report that they already have ‘discontinued cell phone service in the last six months because of actual job loss, fear of job loss, the recession, or any other related financial concerns.’

Check out more details of the survey results:
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2009/03/recession_cellphones.html

I had the pleasure of sitting in on a middle market private equity company’s annual meeting recently in Chicago. It’s always interesting to get different perspectives and predictions on the state of the economy and the timeframe of its recovery… as well as how that recovery will actually happen.

A private equity investor with a 30+ year tenure in the industry finds the following:

• PATIENCE: We must be patient – this is a process, not an event.

• LOW GROWTH: for the next three to five years we will be in an “L” recovery (versus U or V) and experience low growth.

• SAVINGS: We must change the way we look at our assets and how we both spend and invest our money.  For Americans, homes were once our primary asset, but now we need to become savings driven, not real estate driven.

• THINK LOCAL: Recovery will begin at the local level with small business and grow outward from there. Innovation is key to helping move this recovery along.