Basics. They aren’t pretty. They aren’t necessarily exciting. They take a lot of focus. You can’t delegate any of it. The basics behind growing a successful company don’t change. Many things do change in the myriad of challenges that go along with growing a business, but short-cut the basics and you will regret it.
It was around 2 in the morning on a fall evening in 2001. I had turned in my resignation to my business partner at the company I had helped grow from 2 people to over 120 people, up to $12 million in sales. Life has its way of waking you up and in this situation, my concern over what I would do now that I was unemployed after 28 years of working, the last 14 at this marketing communications company, had me, to say the least, nervous.
I wanted to help other business owners grow their businesses based on the lessons I had learned. The thought that raced through my brain at 2 a.m. was ‘what made us successful?’ What were the key lessons we had learned, the hard way, I might add, that turned our small start-up into a multimillion dollar enterprise?
I literally jumped out of bed, raced to my office and captured these concepts. Nine years have passed since that day in 2001. I continue to pull out these ‘basics’ in all aspects of the work I’ve been doing with business owners. And I still witness the impact that ignoring any one of these has on a company’s ability to grow.
#1: You don’t have a vision or if you do, no one else knows about it.
#2: You haven’t taken the time to define and articulate your values.
#3: You haven’t built a strong management team.
#4: You are uncertain about how your company will grow, unaware of growth’s impact.
#5: You have abdicated financial responsibility to someone else.
#6: You don’t have a defined customer success program in place.
#7: Your communications aren’t intentional, they are sporadic and not consistent.
#8: There isn’t a defined culture.
#9: Training takes a back seat to almost everything else.
#10: Employees aren’t engaged because they don’t think you care.
You notice that I call these the 10 Reasons Your Company Isn’t Growing. You might also notice none of them focus on marketing and sales. It’s not because marketing and sales aren’t critical to your company’s ability to grow. It’s because I’ve not encountered a CEO who wasn’t focused on marketing and sales. That isn’t to say they had it wired. But they knew that without a solid marketing and sales plan, their business wouldn’t generate income.
However, when it comes to having a clearly defined vision and making sure the entire company understands it — not so good! The same with the other 9 aspects that I know, from experience, are critical to setting up a foundation that will support a company’s growth plan in good times and bad times.
Follow my blog posts as I go into more detail on each of these 10 critical strategies that may not get a CEO pumped every day, but are critical to creating a company that can sustain profitability, productivity and performance.
Tags: entreprenuers, growing a business, leadership development, leadership skills, management ideas