"Virtual companies are great to run, but difficult to sell. Buyer comes shopping, what's he going to get? A handful of employment contracts. Put some bricks and mortar around it; populate it with some bodies. People want to see what they're buying, even it half of it is only window dressing. There's a reason people dress up their windows."

Isn't that the theory behind Potemkin villages?

grrrr.... I hate that he's entirely right.

Great piece... led me to Barbara Corcoran's video series for Inc:  , particularly one "How perception creates reality."

She talks about many of these in her book If You Don't Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails: And Other Lessons I Learned from My Mom It's a great book, wonderfully inspiring. Perhaps it's a bit of chick-empowerment, but I'm there.

Another piece I happened to be re-reading hits the same melody in the key of Marketing is Seth Godin's All Marketers are Liars His key concept is that marketing's job is to get the customers to tell themselves the lie.

All marketers tell stories. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche is vastly superior to a $36,000 Volkswagen that's virtually the same car. We believe that $125 sneakers make our feet feel better--and look cooler--than a $25 brand. And believing it makes it true.

Interesting point is that the second part of the advise were the perfect books done PWC.

While working on the 'curb appeal', the fundamentals were also made crystal clear.

I think it's true, anything, which looks good and have perfect metrics proving it's good inside is a great product to sell and great product to buy.

While buyers can spend time looking for the diamond in the rough, time is money, if it loos good and measures good, it's good to buy...

Then, of course, there's the theory that we don't give "looks" enough credit (see Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, while I'm going through my bookshelf...). That argument says that an expert is able to match patterns more quickly than they're able to articulate and they just know what "looks" good.

So... yeah. Looks matter, but as you say, the inside matters too.