Every organisation at some stage faces the challenge of how to grow and scale. From a tradesman hiring their first full-time apprentice to a multinational expanding into a new country, everyone shares the same challenge: How do you effectively manage growth?
Grow too fast and you risk running out of cash or losing focus. Grow too slow or fail to modernize and you risk redundancy.
Sadly, the world is full of dead or dying companies, big and small, that failed to manage their growth. On a happier note, the world is also full of successful companies, big and small, that have managed their growth.
So what’s the difference?
The first thing to know about growth is that its binary – black or white. You either grow or you shrink. There is no 'stay the same' in business.
In our economy, a company that does not grow revenue, shrinks. Even if you just measure against inflation. If your income is the same year after year, the value of the income diminishes as inflation rises.
A dollar buys less of the things you need to produce and sell your product. Eventually your company will disappear.
Your crime? Failure to manage growth.
This binary nature of growth is a powerful enabler. It removes all justifications and excuses about company performance. At the end of the day the person in charge, the executives and each individual employee, need to answer the question: Did we grow?
The Challenge
The biggest challenge a manager or CEO faces is lack of reliable data. Instead, they are flooded with excuses and reasons why or battered with internal politics, none of which achieve growth.
What the owner and manager need are usable, reliable statistics.
Statistics monitor progress and growth. Simply put, they are a recording of an amount of something, compared to an earlier amount of the same thing. For example, if you are measuring income, making $1 million might sound impressive, until you compare it to the $3 million you made the week before.
By measuring something daily, weekly or monthly, you can see if your statistic is improving or worsening and how close you are to achieving your goals.
But if that was all there was to it, business would be plain sailing.
In fact, statistics only form part of the overall growth management picture.
Over the past two decades, I’ve successfully grown several startups and through our online apps, have helped many companies expand at rapid rates. I’ve witnessed both failing and successful companies.
When comparing those that failed to those that achieved success, I discovered 7 key elements that enabled growth. And, done right, the sky's the limit.
1. Get your whole team involved
When you are growing, your first step is getting everyone coordinated and on the same page. Making an organization chart with jobs defined and deliverables shown for everyone to see, co-ordinates your company instantly.
New staff can see where they fit in and who to ask for when they need help. Staff can focus their efforts and the management team know who to assign tasks to.
The process of creating an org chart can help you spot stuck or broken flows in your company. You could have one team member holding 5 different hats, splattered across the organization. The Org Chart helps give you direction on how to clean this sort of inefficiency up.
So your Growth Management System (GMS) should provide full Org Chart functionality allowing you to add EVERYONE in your organisation to the org chart, be they full time, part time or contractors so everyone is on the same page.
2. Set measurable goals and purposes that can be attained
It could be said that one of the most important parts of playing any game, including growing a company or part of one, is establishing the goals and purposes of the company. What are we going for? By when? Is it tough but achievable?
Once you’ve set goals, you can work out your company’s purpose. For example, you may have the goal of doubling your company’s size over the next year and become the largest in your industry. This could be achieved several ways: a) become the premium, most expensive and desirable option, or b) be the cheapest and most affordable. Both could achieve the goal, but depending on the purpose you choose, would change the way your team approached it.
A Growth Management System (GMS) should allow you to set goals, measure their results within finite time periods, align purposes and coordinate your team to grow your business.
3. Make those Goals & Purposes known to your team through Objectives
A brilliant plan inside your head is not enough. Getting it known to your team and everyone playing their role is how you get the big win!
In the envisage GMS we do this through Objectives and Key Results.
Everyone in the company should know what the goal is. Then they can work out how to help achieve it by setting their own Objectives. These individual Objectives provide focus for their day-to-day work, create alignment throughout the organisation and everyone knowing what the other team members are doing.
4. Use statistics to measure and monitor production that achieves growth
With Objectives in place and aligned throughout the organisation, each team member can focus on importances. Progress toward objectives can be measured and monitored and the magic of a Growth Management System (GMS) manifests. Every person from the CEO to the receptionist can see the progress of their Objectives. Growth can be measured and monitored daily. Everyone knows what is happening, what is being achieved and what needs to be done, creating an unstoppable force.
As part of this, you ensure that each role in the company has a clearly stated ‘product' they produce, which is valuable to the company. This must be defined in a statistic, or key performance indicator, that can be measured unambiguously.
For example, “good looking designs produced” is ambiguous. It relies on opinion. This could be better stated as “Designs delivered and accepted as done by the customer.”
With every staff member having a measurable statistic, aligned to the company goals and purposes through objectives, you can really ramp up your company growth!
5. Track significant events
Once you have established your goal-focused team, the next step is to keep track of changes that occur in the organisation. These events are recorded alongside your statistics and help manage your growth performance. Accurately recorded change logs provide a rapidly assimilated list of significant events. They help you see the true cause of successful and unsuccessful initiatives.
A Growth Management System tracks every major change. Some are recorded automatically; personnel changes, new statistics or organisational structure changes. Other events such as marketing campaigns, product launches and new locations are entered manually.
With Event Tracking, you can look back at your statistics and find out why they went up or down, eliminating rumor and guesswork.
6. Report obstacles to growth.
There is a powerful, workable idea that a manager can utilise in running an organisation.
Every situation preventing growth is known by someone.
It’s impossible for a CEO of a multinational company to know what is happening in an office on the other side of the world. Team players with clearly defined objectives have a vested interest in making sure progress is being made. Anything that hinders that progress needs to be resolved, fast.
Many organisations have no structured means to resolve these obstacles—whether it's a broken computer system or an unwilling team member. The usual solutions are either whine or accept, both damaging the culture and growth.
In contrast, a Growth Management System provides a way for team members to report obstacles that prevent or slow the progress of an Objective, providing management with the information necessary to investigate and resolve the situation. There is no room for rumor, blame, complacency or neglect—these are enemies of growth.
With reports every team member has a tool to rectify any situation in the organisation, no matter their role.
7. Coordinate the team around growth through policy, plans and training
Now that you have been operating for a while, you start to know what works and doesn’t work in the company. This valuable hard-won knowledge must be recorded as policy and shared with everyone, especially new personnel. A large part of a leader’s job is getting this policy known and followed by everyone.
A Growth Management System provides a simple platform for sharing policy with your team. But more than that, it tracks and monitors the dissemination of all policy and ensures that those who need to follow it, read it—including future updates. Just like Objectives and Key Results are known and shared, so too is policy. It provides the roadmap to proven success and growth.
Envisage — the world’s first Growth Management System application.
Creating a system that helps managers achieve the above 7 functions is why I built envisage – a proven Growth Management System.
We’ll be updating this blog with examples of how to use a GMS in all parts of a company, from Sales to HR and Finance to Legal and how we helped one of our clients, KnowBe4, Inc. on its path to achieve unicorn status with a one billion dollar market valuation.
I hope it helps you grow too.
To your success.
Mikel Lindsaar
CEO & Founder
Know how to grow with envisage! The world’s first Growth Management System with Statistics, Org Charts, Objectives, Trends, Events and Reports. Try for free on a no risk 14-day trial. We’ll even help you set up all your existing statistics to make sure you succeed in getting your business onto Envisage.
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