Every business starts small. The biggest on the planet all started somewhere, in a garage, dorm room, lab, somewhere between the ears of the entrepreneur.
Most fail, or at best deliver a return that would have been dwarfed by the interest on the same investment in a bank account.
Some however, do succeed.
We all see the ones that do, they are shoved down our throats all the time as the heroes, the ones who made it, and we are asked the question: if they can, why can’t you?
There seems to me to be a consistent sequence of growth, a sequence that hold true across all sorts of products and services, geographies, technologies, and circumstances.
Cheering.
This is the first stage, it seems to be all enthusiasm, cheering from the sidelines, jumping up and down, wishing for stuff to happen. What it is about when you are in the midst of it all is hard grind, chaos, and a shortage of cash.
At the beginning, you work your arse off, seemingly 24/7, with no letup. Everything that gets done depends on you doing it. It is messy, and chaotic, as pressures come from every direction, your attention is demanded by each, which is why the 24/7, and still there is little forward progress. Then there is cash. As you start, nothing is more important that cash. More start-ups go broke for lack of cash than every other reason combined. Managing your cash is simply the most important thing you must do, while ensuring those first customers love you..
Planning & doing.
Assuming you survive the cheering stage, you will have come to the point where you have a little more head time to be used considering ‘what next’. You probably have a small number of employees, and perhaps some outsourced services, like accounting and IT.
Answering the ‘what next’ question will be eating at your guts, as for sure you do not want to continue as you have been. Your kids are growing up without you, your family seem to be strangers, you have not had a weekend with your mates for ages. So, you look forward to a different future, and stumble into some planning. It is never as easy as filling in some generic template, of which there are plenty making alluring promises, it is more about the graft of figuring out how to accumulate and allocate the resources necessary to grow. While the game is still about cash, it has also become about profit, what is left for reinvestment at the end of the month, quarter, and year.
You plan your products and services, the foundation stuff you need to get right, like the legal and regulatory things that must be done. You seek to understand the financial and strategic pressures that are present, and settle for the moment on a business model, how you will turn your chaos into sustainable profitability.
However, a plan, no matter how good it may be at telling the future, envisioning new products, markets, and customers, needs one further ingredient. It needs to be implemented. Plans that do not get implemented are usually called dreams. Yours will also recognise the reality of the muttering of generals throughput the ages that while planning is essential, nothing ever goes exactly to plan, so you must be ready to be agile tactically, while consistent strategically.
Building & growing.
The essential ingredients to building and growing an enterprise, on top of the financial resources that enable that growth are twofold. You need people to do the work, and you need processes for them to follow, and over time, optimise.
The task of being the entrepreneur has changed from one of management, to one of leadership. You are no longer engaged in tactical activity, that is being done by others in a manner that is transparent to overview, and with KPI’s based on outcomes. The task now is about the people doing the work, from the daily tactical stuff to the functional management. Your role is to lead all these people, and to ensure that the processes being deployed deliver on the plan. It is all about the productivity of resources deployed, people and financial, and that is delivered via the processes that evolve.
Anyone who thinks this is easy has never done it.
Anyone who stands on the sidelines and cheers for you might be a cheerleader, supporter, and beneficiary, but they are not a coach. A coach delivers the models and means by which the success is generated, which is much more than cheering, as it involves getting dirty from time to time, being always challenging, and ensuring you are looking beyond the tactical that threatens to consume you.
At each point in this growth pattern, there is a single question that you can ask that will give you an answer to the question of growth potential contained in any tactical decision:
‘Does this scale?’
Many small business owners do not ask this question, so end up selling their time for money: and there is only a limited time in any day. Therefore, if you are about to invest in tactical activity of any type, ask that simple question. If the answer is yes, fine. If it is no, think again.
When you are looking for a coach with the scars to prove experience, browse through the posts on this StrategyAudit site, and then you might want to give me a call.
