Starting and Developing Your Business: Success
Starting and Developing Your Business: Success
You have been in business for a while but you have decided to take things to the next level in your journey. Your business has made it through the establishment phase into the maintenance phase but you want more. One of your main challenges so far has been on your time and lack of organizational depth and structure. If you want to grow, how do you manage that growth?
Success Phase
This phase is characterized by organizational decisions that many times are focused on adding expertise and delegating to capable employees to perform certain functions to further the business’ goals. More than ever, the focus of the owner is more toward the future than to the day-to-day operations. In many cases, the challenge is to add expertise that will further business development while supporting profitability for the future investments in the growth phase that may follow.
What does it Look Like?
Success Business
During this phase the owner and possibly, his advisors begin to perform a critical review of the business and decide what areas could be improved. A “big picture view” of the business is taken to discover areas for improvement, streamlining and strengthening. The owner also must take into account his own strengths and a weakness to determine what gaps he needs to fill. Systems and operational processes are reviewed to find ways to increase output and maintain quality. Ensuring that these systems, as well as financial systems, are providing the right feedback to enable strategic decision-making is also examined.
Decision Points
In this phase many of the decisions will surround people, processes and systems. Many companies that start out small and become successful will have limited people resources, rudimentary systems that won’t support growth and ad hoc processes that lead to errors when the system is stressed. At this point, the changes that a business owner makes to move the company forward will probably involve all three areas.
The business owner will decide which areas of expertise that the company lacks and begin to fill those gaps. The owner may begin by identifying areas where he, himself, is weak and fill those gaps first to begin to establish more capability in the business. For example, if he is good at marketing and sales, he may decide that he will continue to manage those aspects but hire managers to tackle the operations and financial areas. If the company is growing and additional staff is being added, the owner may need to enhance the personnel and human resources department to ensure that good people are hired, developed and compensated.
In order to support growth in sales, the owner may determine that the production systems in place won’t support added volume and must be revamped to improve throughput. On the other hand, an owner may decide that the systems to generate leads and convert those into new customers are lacking and decides that new marketing plans must be developed and executed.
He may also realize that processes that worked in a smaller setting with fewer decision makers, produces errors and latency in a more distributed organization. In this case, the processes will need updating to enable success in the new organization structure as well as support increases in the volume of business that is anticipated.
Summary
The success phase can be challenging, terrifying and exciting all at the same time. The business owner has to realize that now the business has moved from the “it’s all about me” stage to “it’s all about the organization that I build” stage. While still involved in some of the day-to-day, it is imperative that he looks to the future and critically reviews his operation to build a strategy for healthy growth and ready the business for the next phase.
About
Ms. Roberts is the owner of Business Rx, LLC. She works with business owners who are passionate about improving their business in pursuit of their vision, goals and business success. For more information please visit her website @ http://www.bizrx-advisors.com
