Successfully Manage the Growth Journey
Growing a business creates enormous challenges. Grow too quickly and the business may not be able to keep pace. Grow too slowly and you may lose momentum or lose out on opportunities.
Growth can Overwhelm the Business Owner
Growing a business is, for many, unchartered territory. Have you grown a company previously or done this before?
Many businesses outgrow the experience or capability of the founder or his/her team, particularly when they fail to seek help and support (whether by making experienced hires or through outside help and expertise) from those who can help to move the business to the next level. Ultimately, you need to know what you don’t know and to have a set of eyes and ears on what’s coming next in the journey of growth.
Growth Challenges Get Larger as the Business Does
Growing pains (or challenges) don’t disappear – they simply change and get larger as the business does. Whether those challenges are having enough cash, making poor hiring decisions, losing key clients, employees constantly burning out or dealing with letting go, business owners constantly have their decision-making and judgement tested.
All scaling businesses run into glass ceilings or bottlenecks at different stages. The question is whether you can grow through these or remain stuck at a certain level?
You Must be Prepared to Change Behaviour and Mindset to Grow
Many business owners don’t evolve their thinking or mindset and remain stuck in old habits that prevent them from growing.
For example, is the business owner acting in the same way as he/she was when the company was at £100k in revenue, despite it now being at £1m and requiring fundamentally different things from him/her?
Similarly, are you spending large amounts of time putting fires out and working in reactive mode, rather than making time to think and plan and implement better processes?
Not all Growth is Good
Growth can also be bad – getting bigger but less profitable, over-hiring and adding too much overhead, over-stretching cashflow (or running out of cash) are all examples.
We can Help to Navigate the Journey
The point is we can help you to grow more quickly and profitably by navigating some of these challenges. We’ve helped over 800 companies to grow and with our help, clients are able to:
- Focus on High-Value Activities: so the business owner is working on high-leverage activities that are “moving the needle” within the business, rather spending time on low-value tasks.
- Constantly Up-Level: freeing the owner up from working “in” the business to working “on” the business and getting him/her clear on where they make their highest return on time invested.
- Make Strategic Hires: identifying what senior experience is required to strengthen the Management Team in order to take the company to the next level.
- Implement Metrics and KPI’s: creating the right MI and reporting structure so the Business Owner can keep score of what’s going on, whether they are in the business or not.
- Achieve Controlled Growth: ensuring that, even during chaotic growth periods, the wheels aren’t coming off and the business has control and stability.
- Sustainability: eliminating “feast to famine” cycles and moving into sustainable, predictable and consistent growth.
- Overcome Business Stress-Points: by accessing a strategic sounding board to manage the unforeseen challenges associated with scaling a business.
- Think Bigger: what was good enough to take you from say £1m to £5m, isn’t enough to take you from £5m to £10m. We can help you to re-evaluate what’s possible for the business at a larger size or scale.
