Overcoming Top Challenges of a Rapidly Growing Business
Featured
In our practice, we have the honor to work with many successful entrepreneurs and leaders. They have a vision. They have the drive. They have momentum. Growing a thriving business is one of the most thrilling and rewarding experiences in an entrepreneurs lifetime.
However, it can be overwhelming. To maintain high levels of energy and passion while developing their business, they need outside help. They can’t do it alone. They will need assistance to sustain momentum so they can focus on how to build, lead, create, and grow. In other words, they need a team of competent, energetic, and resourceful professionals to see their dream come to fruition.
Assembling such a team is challenging. It’s hard to find qualified people available right when you need them, without a long-term commitment or full-time employment. We successfully solve this issue by providing a pool of experts available when you need them to help entrepreneurs achieve their growth goals.
In our experience, there are five main areas where rapidly growing companies need help:
- Functional expertise
- Prioritization
- Leadership skills
- Managing resources
- Building to scale
Each challenge is unique. Resolving every issue quickly and efficiently is vital for rapidly expanding companies to continue on their short- and long-term growth trajectory.
Functional Expertise
Every entrepreneur has a myriad of tasks that need to be completed on a daily basis. While it’s normal to not have expertise in every field, every area still needs to be taken care of in a successful business. Unfortunately, during rapid growth, when business needs to shift so quickly, there’s not enough time for an existing team (often a team of one) to learn a new function or skill; growing the business takes precedence. However, the stakes are high – just one serious mistake can easily bankrupt a new company. Functional expertise, especially during the period of rapid growth, is vital for a company’s survival.
We work with leaders to assess their current skill set. We provide expert help in areas where leaders lack expertise, or have the expertise, but need to focus their time and energy on more critical tasks central to growth. This can take many forms – from accountants to contract salespeople to data analysts to administrative assistants to logistics planners. Shedding tasks that can be more efficiently done by others and that don’t require direct day-to-day involvement of an entrepreneur leaves them time to accomplish tasks that nobody else can do, while still being assured that every vital task is executed by an expert.
Prioritization
Organizations often have multiple and sometimes conflicting priorities. This is particularly true for smaller, rapidly growing companies. Leaders often have to make hard decisions on how to prioritize those tasks and how to accomplish high impact objectives with minimum outlays.
We work with leaders to separate ‘must haves’ from ‘nice to haves’, depending on a company’s short- and long-term goals and current market conditions. The goal is to stay as close as possible to revenue generation, without sacrificing strategic objectives and longer-term goals.
Prioritization is certainly not all about work. Entrepreneurs work hard to build their business, which leads to many long hours, high stress levels, and if left unchecked, a very unbalanced lifestyle that isn’t sustainable. The risk of burnout is real, with leaders pushing themselves to achieve the impossible. We work with entrepreneurs to prioritize their needs and prevent this from happening. With robust prioritization skills, our clients can lead balanced, productive lives while avoiding burnout.
Leadership Skills
As a business leader or a leadership team, it isn’t enough to just have a winning idea. There are many stakeholders involved in making an idea come to life, such as investors, partners, customers, and employees. Leaders and managers have to display contextual leadership that allows them to adapt management and communication styles to each audience and situation, while remaining authentic and consistent with the messaging.
Apart from the direct responsibilities of running a company, leaders also play a pivotal role in cultivating company culture. Company culture almost always determines how your employees and partners behave when there’s no supervision. Every company has one, good or bad, and this culture will help or hurt a company’s employee retention and productivity. It’s important to carefully build and manage the culture to ensure that your employees exhibit desired behaviors in daily interactions with their coworkers and outsiders alike. It’s the leadership team’s job to be the builders and custodians of the culture.
Effective leadership and positive company culture don’t just improve productivity, they also increase the longevity of the company. It builds the foundation of the brand and how successful it is long term. We work with individual leaders and leadership teams to optimize their management skills and help design and maintain a positive company culture to inspire desired behaviors.
Managing Resources
As an entrepreneur, there’s a lot to be done with limited resources. From hiring staff, purchasing equipment and services, advertising, and more, many expenses need to be considered. We understand this and work closely with leaders to make sure that every dollar is spent most effectively.
Our approach is always to maximize Return on Investment (ROI), and we are very skilled in doing a lot with little. We can devise the most cost-effective ways to run market research, create an investment pitch deck, or pursue a distribution strategy that minimizes stocking fees and brokerage charges.
In your relationship with us, you will have the same freedom to maximize ROI. A modular approach with no commitments lets you tap into the skill set that you need ‘right now’ to use your resources to their fullest. While it isn’t necessary to have unlimited funds, it’s essential to know how to squeeze everything from available resources. We’re experts at this.
Building to Scale
There are many elements of building to scale: positive company culture, productive partner relationships, a healthy innovation line-up, access to funding and solid customer/consumer relationships that lead to the robust sales pipeline. Being able to produce consistent results at scale takes good business processes.
While entrepreneurs need to be opportunistic to grow and often don’t have building scalable processes on top of their minds, not considering the long-term implications of processes is dangerous. Too rigid of a process stunts the ability to adapt to the changing market; too loose of one, and consistent quality becomes jeopardized. We help leaders find the perfect medium, allowing the business to freely evolve while still ensuring long-term consistency.
We help strike the right balance between companies being too rigid or too flexible. This allows for building processes to remain adaptable enough not to hinder long-term growth, yet rigid enough to not to allow deviation from company promise and ethical business practices.
Our promise
Our work with entrepreneurs and leadership teams over the years taught us that one size fits nobody. When you work with us, you can expect a personalized approach to help you, and your company grow, right now, without long-term commitments. We are always flexible to match our help with your needs. No commitments. Just results.