investiledysfunction

The popular blog on all things technology, TechCrunch, recently had a post on something you don’t typically see on the blog - organic growth.  The entry entitled “Does Google Have an Organic Growth Problem” - discusses an analysis by Citi equity research analyst who argues that Google’s organic growth is decelerating.

It was an interesting post and something we were glad to see given our work on organic growth.  Below are our thoughts on the post and the findings about Google.  We’ve benchmarked and analyzed the entire S&P 500 (of which Google is a member) on organic revenue generation and efficiency over the period from 2003-2007, and our #s reveal a similar story, but the picture still is very positive.

We would agree with Citi’s analysis that the organic revenue as a % of total revenue for Google as well as a % of total revenue growth is declining over the longer period we studied.  As compared to Yahoo (the closest comparable to Google if there is one), we have seen that Google is destroying their peer from an organic revenue perspective.Our analysis goes beyond just organic revenue and looks at the efficiency of generating this organic growth, e.g., how much are companies like Google, Yahoo, etc spending to achieve organic revenue growth.  We call this efficiency ratio the Organic Growth Multiplier (OGM).  The logic behind the OGM is that if one company can spend $1 to get $3 of revenue and another can spend $1 to get $5 of revenue, the latter company is healthier and has more momentum in its business.

When we look at the OGM of Google versus Yahoo and versus the larger S&P500 tech financials category, the picture is actually quite pretty for Google.  They’re tops as it relates to OGM which means a dollar of investment into their core business generates more revenue than the average tech sector company.  They also outshine Yahoo on this count as well.

The indexed OGM for Yahoo and Google over the period from 2003-2007 are 50.9 and 312.84, respectively.  Without getting into the quantitative models that underlie this, the point is that Google’s organic revenue efficiency is far superior to Yahoo.

Most importantly from all this work is that we’ve seen that higher OGM and total shareholder return are positively correlated.  So having the ability to generate organic growth efficiently is a good indicator of shareholder returns.

While the assertion that their organic revenue is declining does remain true, the news is not as dire as I’ve been reading elsewhere from those who’ve picked up on this TechCrunch entry.  Yes, if they can turn one of their acquisitions into a money maker, this will obviously supplement some of the organic revenue deceleration that might be evident in their historical core business, but on the whole Google is still a star when it comes to organic revenue generation and efficiency.  The fact that Citi retains its buy rating despite the organic picture is testament to this.

A bit on the methodology.

There are some notable differences from the Citi analysis which despite the similar conclusions do make our analysis more robust.

1.  We’ve looked at a more extensive time period (2003-2007)
2. We strip out market growth for each company.  In essence, if the market is growing at 10% and your company grows at 10%, we don’t give you credit for this.  This is rising tide growth and is not due to management’s actions and investments in the core business.   Organic revenue, therefore, in our models is only the growth we can attribute to management’s prowess (or lack thereof).
3. In our Organic Growth Multiplier, we also look at the efficiency of generating organic revenue by determining how much is spent by each company to achieve its organic revenue.  This gives a truer sense for the efficiency of the company’s organic revenue capabilities.

As the Brilliont team has described in our 10 Un-Commandments of Innovation, the overuse of the term “wisdom of crowds” is pretty nauseating.  An offshoot of the wisdom of crowds hysteria are business models predicated on ‘crowdsourcing’, e.g., leveraging the talents or resources of many to achieve some particular objective.  In the UK, crowdsourcing worked to fund the purchase of a football team for example. 

Amongst the highflyers in this segment are Cambrian House, a Calgary startup that tries to organize the crowd around creating new ideas for Websites and software products.  But alas, the Cambrian House appears to have been foreclosed on with a firesale of its assets just occuring to venture capital firm Spencer Trask per TechCrunch.  

So is this just bad luck or poor execution on the part of Cambrian House or an indication of things to come for other crowdsourced models?  Here’s my unsolicited $.02.

• Most crowdsourced businesses will fail.  Not because crowdsourcing is incompatible with good business, but because a lot of people looking to “pile on” and who have no business starting a company will start crowdsourcing businesses and raise some dumb money while the concept is hot.  Their businessplan/pitch will contain the words web2.0, wisdom of crowds, open source and will surely get investors into a lather.  The failure, however, of these businesses has less to do with crowdsourcing as an idea than the management team and their half-baked ideas and ineptness as operators I suspect. 
• Crowdsourcing will work better in things where the outcome is clearly defined.  Want to buy a football team?  I can see how that works.  Want to build a software or something electronic?  Visualizing this and understanding how my own contributions fit into the whole is a bit more nebulous.  Clarity of what is being crowdsourced will be important to the initial successes.

Time, of course, will tell us if crowdsourcing is here to stay and to what extent.  I do think there is some merit in the crowdsourcing idea, but it’ll take a while to separate the few winners from the many many losers.  Bye Cambrian House.