You’ve grown your business vastly over the past few years. Your company has more clients and constantly hires new people, but you begin to realize that current management methods are no longer sufficient. There are more and more fires at work that take up your precious time.
This means your organization has reached the next level of growth and needs new mechanisms to fight barriers to scale. Scaling Up was created for mid-market companies to overcome these challenges and set the basis for sustainable business growth.
To quote Peter Drucker “The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions.”
I know it can be hard to decide what needs to be changed to move the company forward. Especially when you work in business on a daily basis. The answer can be found when you ask the right questions in the four key areas of growth: People, Strategy, Execution and Cash.
Do you have the right people on the bus? Do they have a great desire, values, skills and talents necessary to succeed? Is the organizational structure designed to enable your company to reach to the next level? Are your people focused and working on the most important priorities each quarter, month, week and day? Great companies develop a discipline to ask these questions regularly and then take action to ensure they are happening in the culture.
Is your strategy driving results? And are those results sustainable? Revenue and gross margins growth are your two best indicators whether you have a killer strategy or not. If your top line revenue is flat, declining or not meeting your expectations, it is most likely you have a strategy issue. But what is a strategy anyway? To quote a thought leader, Michael Porter “Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities from your competitors.”
Are all the processes in your company running smoothly and without drama? Are they driving industry-leading profitability? Execution is about hitting and exceeding company targets and goals. It’s about turning your hard-earned revenue into bottom-line net profit. Companies that are strong on topline performance and yet struggle to make a reasonable or attractive bottom-line profit typically have challenges with execution – being both efficient and effective operationally.
Do you have consistent sources of cash, ideally generated internally, to fuel the growth of your business? You can have decent people, decent strategy and decent execution but not a day without cash. Cash is literally the oxygen that feeds your business model. And there is nothing more frustrating than having a potential acquisition or a need to invest into a new business and not having cash to go after those constraints and opportunities. So you need to know which profit levers to pull in order to better your cashflow.