As we emphasize throughout our website, reputation is the most valuable asset of any person or organization. It must be preserved and built with great care.
If you want to build reputation for your business, you will have to start with building your own self esteem and being true to yourself. Think and write down the principles and values by which you want to lead your life. Do not try to live by other people’s principles. In the long term, honesty towards yourself, your family, work, customers, employees, suppliers will pay off more than anything else.
So be honest and your self esteem will grow and would start impacting everything in a positive manner. Once you have got control over yourself, you can now start looking at ways to build your business reputation.
Here are some of the proven tips for building reputation:
- Be brutally honest even if it costs you money. Admit your mistakes when you do wrong things. Trust can not exist without honesty and transparency.
- Do not make promises that you can not keep; learn to say no if you think you would not be able to keep a promise. Keep your promise to deliver on time and if you can not deliver communicate it asap.
- Do not try to be the cheapest at the cost of service. It would cost you more.
- Pay suppliers, creditors on time as per the negotiated terms, if you can not renegotiate the terms.
- Look after your staff well, they would reciprocate in the same manner with other business stakeholders.
- Communicate with authority, even if you communicate less.
- Let others speak about your virtues; let customers tell how good you are to other prospects; Let investors tell other investors.
Building reputation takes years to build but it can get crushed in a moment. It is your reputation that goes hand in hand with your business’ reputation so your actions are impacting your business’ reputation. So keep proper communication with any one and inform them if there are chances of default.
Try to have people, in your network/work area/ as friends, who have good reputation. This would automatically enhance your reputation. When you have people good reputation , businesses would start approaching you for business.
Whatever you earn in the end would make you happy as all through your life/career you have lived upto the principles and values that you had chosen for yourself.
Options for Avalon’s Board
Best Option: Raise debt capital, pledging whatever assets it can, and use that for two purposes:
(a) do the biotech drug development with a strict performance based incremental investment
(b) start a service based revenue stream that can generate some operating cash.
Avalon Board and CXOs have to figure out what services they can offer to the industry, like taking outsourcing work from other larger companies…they should do something extra along with R&D work if they are serious about keeping the company afloat. There are many biotechs struggling in the market doing pure-play R&D, and equity capital won’t come easily especially with no results to show with the previous $30 million from last year.
Second Best Option: Sell the partial rights of work-in-progress research to a larger biotech or pharma who can afford to use the research, and get cash in return.
Either way, existing investors should be very cautious to put more money into the business at this stage.
Background Business Developments
Thursday, August 14, 2008; Washington Post Page D01
Avalon Pharmaceuticals told investors yesterday that it will not be able to continue operations past this year if it can’t secure more funding. The Germantown biotech said its second-quarter loss narrowed to $5.6 million, from $5.8 million in the comparable period last year. Revenue was $137,000 for the quarter ended June 30, up from $78,000, thanks to its collaboration with Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. But Avalon’s cash, equivalents and marketable securities totalled $16.7 million, an amount that restrains its plans.
“We are acutely aware of our need to raise additional capital in the near term and are vigorously exploring a number of options,” C. Eric Winzer, Avalon’s CFO, said during a conference call with investors.
To thin its expenses, Avalon will cut a third of its employees, reducing its workforce to about 35 people. The biotech, which focuses on cancer therapies, will stop work on its most advanced drug candidate and focus on AVN316, a drug that inhibits a cell pathway containing several proteins that play a role in the start and spread of cancer.
Avalon has partnerships with Merck and other firms to investigate compounds to fight several ailments, including cancer. Avalon could receive up to $200 million in milestone, regulatory and other payments as part of its Merck agreement, a partnership created last year to attack a target previously regarded as “undruggable.”
The decision to stop work on AVN994, which targets an enzyme that is sometimes overproduced in some cancer cells, especially blood malignancies, surprised analysts. AVN316 is better understood and appreciated by big pharmaceutical companies, Kenneth C. Carter, Avalon’s chief executive, told investors. “We believe our focus on these other programs will provide better shareholder value in the near term and long term,” Carter said.
Last year Avalon raised $30 million in private stock placements to fund its drug pipeline programs. Shares fell 29 percent yesterday, closing at 73 cents, the company’s lowest since going public in 2005.
Slow clinical drug development, which is typical of biotechs, coupled with poor market conditions, have hampered financing, said George B. Zavoico, an analyst with Cantor Fitzgerald in New York. Like small, struggling biotechs before it, Avalon now faces partnering with another company, debt financing or selling itself. But the big drug companies are losing patent protection on high-revenue products. “There is a little bit of reluctance to enter into partnership as easily and generously as when they were collecting billions of dollars off blockbuster drugs,” Zavoico said. “They see their revenue streams tightening up.”
