If you’ve ever looked through a storage box holding clothes you wore as a child, you may have wondered, “How did I ever fit into something that small?”
Your company may be in the same situation. The equipment, personnel, and premises that fitted well when the company was starting out, may be constraining its growth as it matures.
One of the most pressing areas for change may not be your production system,
In building your business, do you ever:
Feel out of control – you’re getting by, dealing with one crisis after another, but just barely hanging on?
Find that your longstanding products and services just aren’t selling like they used to, but you can’t find time to develop new offerings?
Think about retiring after selling out to a group of your employees, but you know that they (and you) are nowhere near to making that possible?
Entrepreneurship means taking risks, such as launching new products, entering new markets, or using new processes. Because this involves uncertainty, there are always chances that things will go wrong.
Our experience at the CFO Centre has been that the most successful companies take the time to understand the downside of the risks they take, and then find a way to compensate for those downsides.
As the CFO Cente’s book “Scale Up” says,
Any business owner will eventually be faced with the need to sell their business.
It could happen when a medical change or injury makes it impossible to continue, and you need to sell to secure your family’s future. Or maybe an offer comes along that’s just too good to refuse.
Regardless of the reason, it’s always a good idea to take steps to make your business ready for sale at any time.
Maybe you see ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft as arrogant bullies. Or, to you, they’re a breath of fresh air in a world held victim by over-regulated dinosaurs.
But whatever your view, you can’t deny that ride-hailing upended an entire industry. Some taxi companies have tried to compete with the upstarts through rideshare-like mobile apps allowing customers to choose vehicle options, pre-book rides, and pay by smartphone.
Why have ride-sharing services succeeded against well-entrenched opposition?
Venture Capitalists, angel investors, bankers and private-equity managers may not agree on much, but there is one idea they share. They’d rather put their money behind a stellar management team even if it has a just-okay idea than put it into a brilliant idea implemented by a ho-hum management team.
If your company is seeking to break out of startup mode and into a period of aggressive growth, how do you go about building that stellar management team?
Do you ever feel that growing your business is like being a bird in a cage? Even if it’s a big cage, it’s still got its limits. For your business, that “cage” can be a lack of cash needed to let your business fly as high as it can.
It shows up when you’re hit with a lack of cash to hire new people, to move to larger premises,
If you have ambitions to grow your small company into a large one, you need to make sure it has room to grow.
To see how that works, consider that humble box of baking soda in your refrigerator. Baking soda was originally developed for, well, baking. It solved a baker’s problem – the difficulty of getting baked goods to rise. But then, people discovered other problems the product solved – diaper rash, kitchen fires,
What if Bill Hewlett and David Packard had never got out of that famous Palo Alto garage? If they’d stayed a two-person company, we likely would’ve never heard of them – and the history of Silicon Valley would have been very different. Instead, at its peak in 2011, Hewlett Packard had nearly 350,000 employees around the world.
There are many small startups of the size Hewlett Packard was back in that garage, and it’s important for governments to encourage entrepreneurs to start companies.
Rapid growth is the stuff most entrepreneurs dream about as they take their fledgling company through the early years but when it happens, it can quickly become the stuff of nightmares.
The bubbles in the celebratory champagne—“Here’s to our success!”—barely have time to go flat before the problems arise across the high-impact growth or Scale Up business.
Suddenly owners are beset by problems involving the people they’ve hired or not hired,
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