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Here are the 3 short profiles that will dramatically boost your business's growth. Sometimes its important to know how to grow your business. Check the blog to know how to make a profit in business.

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3 short profiles that will dramatically boost your business’s growth

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Here are the 3 short profiles that will dramatically boost your business’s growth. Sometimes its important to know how to grow your business. Check the blog to know how to make a profit in business.

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Sustain business growth - In recent articles we’ve been looking at how to build a truly effective strategic plan for next year. Check out the article to know about how to sustain a business.

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4 Ways Your Strategic Plan May Be Taking You Off Course

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Sustain business growth - In recent articles we've been looking at how to build a truly effective strategic plan for next year. Check out the article to know about how to sustain a business.

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It's important for any business owner to understand growth vs. scaling! Read our ultimate guide today If you have a successful business and want to know how you can grow and scale your business.

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If you have a successful business, then you know how to grow - after all, that's what initial success in business is: finding a profitable, sustainable market, and steadily increasing your share of that market.
But there comes a time in the evolution of every business when selling more isn't enough.

At some point, the mathematics of growth begin to break down, and simply doing more of what you've done before brings increasingly diminishing returns.

The reason for this is straightforward:

Growth brings complexity (more products, more locations, more people, more everything...), and for a smaller, growing business, complexity drains profitability.

At this point, the answer to every problem up to now - simply selling more - makes the problem worse:

More sales brings even more complexity, which drives down profitability even further. Call it organizational growing pains.

The answer is as simple as the problem is obvious: put systems and processes in place that allow the organization to scale.

In order to scale - to deliver consistent, profitable products and services in the face of complexity, the organization must learn how to do grown-up things like hiring and firing professionally, make team-based decisions, and work cross-functionally.

Sounds obvious, and relatively straightforward, right?

And yet many businesses never make the transition from being small and growth-oriented, to becoming larger and able to scale.
Here are the three main reasons owner-managed businesses get caught in a state of perpetual adolescence, and never reach maturity:
1. Addicted To Selling.

There's something beguilingly addictive about selling. And many founders and business owners find it close to impossible to relinquish the dopamine rush that comes from making a sale.

As a consequence two things happen:

The founder/owners try to overcome the whitewater of growing complexity by doing the very thing that will make the situation worse: generating more sales;

and secondly, they balk at making the time available to engage in actually managing the business.

2. Inability To Say 'No'.

Early stage growth - growing by selling - is all about saying 'Yes'.

Yes, we can deliver that product to you by next Wednesday. Yes, we can translate the user guide into Chinese for you. Yes, we can paint the widgets green if you'd like.

It's this flexibility and can-do approach that enables us to grab market share early on.

By performing superhuman feats of customer responsiveness, we grab business that should rightly go to competitors 10, 20, 50 times our size.

It's an exhilarating time, and one during which the myths and legends of the business are born.

Problem is, scaling - building the infrastructure of the business so that it can grow to whatever size your industry will allow - requires the frequent, disciplined use of the word 'No'.

For the first time, the business is faced with the situation that simply because it can do a thing, doesn't mean it should.

Strategic scaling means taking a disciplined approach to growth - saying 'No' if that Chinese translation is merely a distraction from our strategic goals, for example - something that is hard to do when you're hard-wired to say 'Yes'.

3. Fear Of Failure.

Managing a mature business - one that has the systems and processes to overcome complexity, and the discipline to adhere to them - is entirely different from managing a smaller, growth-oriented business.

Many business owners sense this as they begin to grapple with the consequences of success, and instinctively shy away from a challenge they feel may be beyond their capability.

And who can blame them?

There's absolutely nothing wrong with sticking to what you're good at, and protecting an already successful business by capping growth.

Better to stay small, happy and successful than strive for scale, only to be miserable.

What about you - Has Your Organization Got The Essential Components in Place To Scale?

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Sure, you can grow - but can you scale? - Know the Difference between Growth vs Scaling

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If you have a successful business, then you know how to grow - after all, that's what initial success in business is: finding a profitable, sustainable market, and steadily increasing your share of that market. But there comes a time in the evolution of every business when selling more isn't enough.

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Want to learn how to scale your business? Check out the three indicators that you need to shift your perspective upstream, and concentrate on your top team (including yourself!) for growth this year and beyond.

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Scale Your Business with Predictable Success

The nature of my role means that most of the calls and emails I receive are from founders and leaders looking for a way to jump-start their organization, division, department, project, group or team's growth.

Here, in no particular order, are the five most common reasons they give me for calling or emailing in the first place:

1. General economic headwinds;

2. Tired product or service line;

3. Change in market demographics;

4. Negative effect of recent technological or legislative change;

5. New or revived competition in the marketplace.

And here, in ranked order, are the three most common reasons our work together identifies as the actual barrier to growth or higher performance:

1. Leadership blind spot(s) on the part of the leader who first called, usually in the category of 'what got you here won't get you there';

2. General dysfunction in the top team;

3. Lack of knowledge / skills required to make consistent, effective, high-quality team-based decisions.

In other words, the majority of leaders spend too much time, money and energy trying to change the symptoms of stalled growth when they should be looking upstream, at the causes.

Here are three indicators that you need to shift your perspective upstream, and concentrate on your top team (including yourself!) to achieve sustainable growth this year and beyond:

1. There is no clear consensus on what the underlying growth problem is.

Johanna is sure the reason you've stalled is because of the fallout from the failed product launch last year.

Enrique is equally adamant that the core issue is the lack of a robust IT infrastructure.

Vanna in marketing is convinced that your lack of a social media footprint is the real problem.

If you have a similar hodgepodge of equally plausible, equally strongly-held views amongst your top team, but little or no consensus around them, then chances are that your real problem is the team itself.

Whether hunkered down in silos, firing missiles at each other, or simply talking over each other, you likely have a team that works on anecdote and autopsy - one which hasn't learned to gather and analyze data to make high-quality decisions.

2. There is consensus, but little or no effective action.

Everyone agrees on what the single issue is that's preventing you from achieving the growth you want - and despite the fact that you meet, and talk, and meet and talk...and meet, and talk - nothing ever actually gets done about it.

You may have even called in a high-priced consultant, or held a kaizen, or hired a new executive to fix the problem...you have, in short, solutions coming out the wazoo.

But the underlying problem is still there. If that's the case, then you almost certainly have a top team that's dysfunctional, or which at least needs to learn how to work laterally together to not just make decisions, but to effectively implement them.

3. Everyone looks the other way when you start talking about it.

You have a clear idea of what the key issue is for this year. You want to make sure everyone else 'gets it'. But for some reason, they don't seem to want to.

Instead of engaging with you, your top team changes the topic, looks the other way, discovers an urgent emergency to attend to, or simply glaze over.

If this is your situation (and assuming your top team aren't a bunch of numpties), chances are you've hit a leadership blind spot.

Something has blind-sided you and you're temporarily (hopefully) missing the mark in how you perceive the underlying issue.

What about you? What steps are you taking to unlock success for your organization?

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To Unlock Growth For Your Organization, Look Up(stream)

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The nature of my role means that most of the calls and emails I receive are from founders and leaders looking for a way to jump-start their organization, division, department, project, group or team's growth.

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Want to know how to scale a business? Here is a paraphrased summary of the 10 most impactful questions that highly adaptable leaders make sure their organization can answer.

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How To Scale A Business

As we've all learned (painfully) in recent years, we're currently in an economic cycle that requires openness to change and reinvention for any organization to survive, let alone thrive.
Put simply, what at one point looked like an unforeseeable ' black swan' event became, in fact, just the precursor to a sea change in how we have to think about attaining sustainable growth.

All easier said than done, of course. And even more easily done if it were all to happen in a vacuum, or if you could stop time, or if you could just take your business or not-for-profit 'into the garage' and retool it. But the reality is that you need to somehow do it while continuing to run a complicated organization.

Rethinking how you grow is a bit like trying to swap out the engines on an airplane while you're flying it - I'm sure that somehow, some way, it's do-able, but it would take an incredible feat of engineering, let alone enormous bravery and superhuman focus.

Despite that, many, many organizations manage to do so - not just once, but as often as is needed to stay relevant and vibrant in a fast-changing world.

I can say this, not just because I'm a nerd who avidly follows such things, but because I'm privileged to work with organizations like this every single day. Organizations which have senior leadership teams who stay consistently one step ahead (or at worst, just one short step behind - sometimes that's enough) of even the most tumultuous economic headwinds.

How do they do it? Well, the answer to that is really what this entire blog is about, and we have 1,000 posts and counting, but I can share with you the one solid foundation they all share:

They know how to ask good questions.

Hardly earth shattering, you say?

Truth be told, it is. Why? Because in my experience the vast majority of leadership teams don't really ask high-level, change-oriented questions at all, and if they do, they're usually the wrong ones.
Here is a paraphrased summary of the 10 most impactful questions that highly adaptable leaders make sure their organization can answer:
1. Is my senior leadership team able to consistently make high-quality, team-based decisions? If not, why not?

2. Once decisions have been made, are they fully executed? (Or do they languish and seem to pop up as an agenda item again and again?)

3. Does my organization have the necessary team members in place to not only grow your business, but scale it?

4. Is my organization fully responding to the needs of your customers ( both internal and external)?

5. What's my senior leadership team's speed to clarity - the lapsed controllable time between the emergence of an issue and its resolution? How is it impacting our bottom line?

6. Has our growth stalled for reasons that aren't fully clear? If so, how do I pinpoint the problem(s) and discover how to achieve successful resolution(s)?

7. Have we developed a genuine strategic plan for this year, or are we primarily reacting to what happened last year?

8. Do I have a vision for where my organization should be this year, but lack a step-by-step action plan for how to execute it?

9. How do we cultivate buy-in to the needed changes to reinvent ourselves throughout every level of our organization?

10. Do I know where my organization stands in the lifecycle every organization goes through, the specific challenges this is causing, and how to overcome them?

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The 10 Questions that Will Determine Your Organization's Future

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As we've all learned (painfully) in recent years, we're currently in an economic cycle that requires openness to change and reinvention for any organization to survive, let alone thrive. Put simply, what at one point looked like an unforeseeable ' black swan' event became, in fact, just the precursor to a sea change in how we have to think about attaining sustainable growth.

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Join our Business Growth Workshop to gain valuable insights and strategies for scaling your company. Register now and take the first step towards achieving your growth goals. Visit our website to learn more.

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A personal note from Les McKeown

It's my life's work to help leaders just like you grow their organizations, whether that's a for-profit business, a faith- or cause-based organization, a charity or even an NGO (I've worked - and continue to work with - them all).

Through spending 15 years as a serial entrepreneur and decades working as a trusted growth advisor alongside founders and CEOs of every conceivable type of organization, I've had the privilege of developing out a trusted, effective, sustainable growth model that has proved itself in thousands of organizations all over the globe.

I hope you'll join me in this workshop where I'll share that model with you and other growth leaders just like you..

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The 10-Step Roadmap to Growing ANY Business or Not-for-Profit: Workshop

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A personal note from Les McKeown It's my life's work to help leaders just like you grow their organizations, whether that's a for-profit business, a faith- or cause-based organization, a charity or even an NGO (I've worked - and continue to work with - them all).

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Are you looking for effective business growth strategies? Discover the 4 factors of growthiness that provides the most compelling evidence of growthiness. Visit us now at Predictable Success.

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Listen to Les McKeown read this blog post:

Business Growth Strategies

A hunk of years ago I discovered that a couple of decades helping senior executives grow their organizations had developed in me an innate ability to assess any organization's predisposition to growth - and given the right people to meet with, in the right context, I can usually do it in around 90-180 minutes or so.

Over time, all my wandering in and out of hundreds upon hundreds of offices, boardrooms, cubicles, factory plants, paint shops, warehouses and supervisor's huts asking some version of the same questions over and over and over again have coalesced into a series of intuitive pattern recognitions which, taken together, provide me a primitive 'growthiness index', if you will: a rough stab at whether or not this particular organization at this particular time is predisposed toward growth, or not.

My insta-take on growthiness isn't a short cut to anything much. But in my work with senior executives it greatly simplifies the number of variables we have to think about, helps me direct my bunch of questions accordingly, gives us a backdrop against which to work, and helps avoid going down unprofitable lines of enquiry. Occasionally, of course, my initial conclusions have been off the mark, but they've been right more often than not, and often enough for me to trust the process.

Here are the four main indicators that for me, provide the most compelling evidence of growthiness. In the space of a blog post, I can only give a taste of what I'm looking for in each, but you'll get the gist:

1. A pervasive positive outlook

Organizations inclined toward growth display a positive outlook in every area of their operations - not just in the C-suite or the sales team or at the receptionist's desk, but also in the mail room, the janitor's office, the IT department - everywhere.

And by 'positive', I don't mean jaunty, or willfully ignorant people, or just wishful thinking - I'm talking about knowledgeably informed people who have an openness and a tendency to focus on success and opportunity more than on failure.

I can usually gauge this by simply wandering around and talking to people without any fanfare.

2. An adult relationship to data

Organizations that are predisposed to grow have a mature attitude to information: it's just data, to be seen in it's undisguised truth and acted upon accordingly.

There's neither a "I don't want to know the facts - I might have cancer" nor a "You better have hit your numbers - don't bring me bad news" approach. The numbers are what they are, and we better deal with them.

Twenty minutes discussing recent results or future projections with the senior team instantly gives me a good read on this.

3. Individuals with informed horizons

All senior executives work to what I think of as a 'horizon window' - the farthest point they're looking at when making strategic decisions.

An executive team with an insular horizon window - one which is relentlessly focussed solely on the closed world of the organization itself - tends to get mired in tactical firefighting and constant maintenance / improvement / remedying of internal operations.

Such teams tend to have a low growthiness index, because instead of making progress on their growth journey, they're instead spending most of their time filling in potholes of their own making.

Conversely, an executive team with too far a horizon window (all stategic vision, all the time) is one which gets caught up in building castles in the sky and has difficulty implementing in the real world. They too have a low growthiness index.

The ideal is to find an executive team comprised of individuals with appropriately informed horizons - individuals able to switch as needed between the internal (organizational) horizon, their industry as a whole and the key strategic imperatives within it, and the overall economic / macro situation within which their organization and the industry as a whole is operating.

A 45-90 minute session with the executive team discussing recent past performance, current results and future strategic plans will usually bring this out.

4. Team cohesion

The final - and vital - indicator of growthiness is what I call 'the Dollar-Bill Rule":

What's the degree of light that can be shone between members of the executive team?

The answer? There shouldn't be any. Once your senior team has made a decision, no-one should be able to slide a dollar bill between any of you in your joint and individual commitment to its execution and success.

If when I work with leadership teams it becomes clear in a series of one-on-ones that there are substantial personal or professional differences between the senior team members, then all of the previous three indicators are for naught. If, on the other hand, there is obvious, authentic unity between the team members, then they'll likely have a high growthiness index.

Note that in this context 'unity' doesn't mean false parroting of inauthentic expressions of agreement. Nor does it assume that everyone is in love with everyone else. It simply means that there is real, genuine, deep debate within the executive team when they are together, and an equally real, genuine acceptance of cabinet responsibility for the final decision when it is made - no cop-outs, no eye-rolling, no undermining other team members.

So, how is your organization doing with the four factors of growthiness? On a scale of 1-10, how would you rank your team on each?

*With apologies to Stephen Colbert

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Listen to Les McKeown read this blog post: A hunk of years ago I discovered that a couple of decades helping senior executives grow their organizations had developed in me an innate ability to assess any organization's predisposition to growth - and given the right people to meet with, in the right context, I can usually do it in around 90-180 minutes or so.