Does Spending More On Marketing Equal More Success ?

There is no doubt that many surveys show that an increase in marketing spend leads to an increase in growth. However there seems to be only a limited correlation. Take this statistic for example; if we compare at High Growth businesses (defined as growing at 20%+pa for 2 years or more) with average growth companies we get a radically different picture. The figures collated from a recent survey on High Growth businesses by Hinge Marketing is that an average business, that is one that grows at less than 20% per annum, spends about 5.1% of its turnover on marketing. At the top end of average businesses marketing spend can be as much as 12% of sales. The average of the high growth firms surveyed showed their average spend was 4.9% of sales. Slightly lower than the median for the average business! A bit of a surprise given that they are growing up to 5 times faster than the top spenders of the average business and spending much less on marketing.

That leads to the obvious question. Why? In short its to do with how High Growth businesses address their market. For one thing they are much more focused on meeting clients needs than the average business. For another they have a much clearer understanding of who they were selling to and what their needs are. Basically these high growth businesses have recognised more than the average business, that their clients and prospects are only interested in themselves and concentrated on answering two questions: 

What problem do I solve for my customer?
Why should my customers buy from me rather than my competitors?

These High Growth businesses seemed to have recognised two things. Firstly that customers are selfish and are really only interested on what suppliers can do to help them overcome their own problems. Secondly High Growth businesses have spent a considerable amount of time and effort answering the question why me? 

This really sets them apart. In a recent workshop I asked the 20 or so participants to answer the question “why should my customers buy from me rather than my competitors?” and without exception they all struggled. Some actually admitted they couldn't answer it at all. 

This was further demonstrated when the same survey rate the elevator pitch. They asked each CEO to give us their brief elevator pitch. They then rated their response on a 5-point scale based on three criteria:

1) Clarity of the firm’s capabilities and purpose

2) Clarity of the target market

3) Articulation of the firm’s competitive advantage

High Growth businesses scored an average of 72.7%

Average growth businesses scored an average of 45.2%

What this signifies is that successful sales and marketing has more to do with the clarity and uniqueness of your proposition than the size of your wallet.

To get a full copy of the report from Hinge Marketing go here

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Exigent Consulting provides specialist services to the Small and Medium Business including Managing High Growth, Business Turnaround, and Mentoring. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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What Do High Growth Businesses Do Differently?

That’s a question that most of us find intriguing because we all want to know the secret of success. Many business owners I know, whom others might consider successful, are themselves a little nervous as they don’t really understand why they got to where they are now. Their problem, obviously, is that if they don't understand why they got there in the first place; they won’t know what to do if things go wrong.

You might have noticed that more recently I have been focusing on ambitious business owners that are seeking to rapidly grow their business. These High Growth businesses provide us with some valuable insights about how to be successful. A recent survey of High Growth businesses in the USA by Hinge Marketing concluded that there were 4 things that high growth businesses do differently from others, which contributed to their growth.

1. They focus on delivering client’s desired outcomes. They were not touting the firm’s qualifications or their products or service strengths but rather what the results were of providing their product or services and what it meant to the client. This idea of focusing on outcomes makes them much more likely to deliver as they have their eyes on the prize.

2. They are truly customer focused; their job is to make the client’s life easier. You won’t hear complaints about customer attitude or how clients are making their life difficult. They see a problem with a customer as an opportunity for them to improve. Some businesses are actually disappointed if they don’t get negative feedback from their clients as it doesn't give them the opportunity to further improve their business.

3. They are flexible. They recognise how much, both prospects and clients, value flexibility and very many high growth businesses feature flexibility in their marketing and sales material.

4. They focus on their reputation. They work very hard at promoting and protecting their reputation and their brand.

There is a 5th thing that High Growth businesses do, or rather and interestingly what they don’t do and that is spend excessive amounts on marketing. Surprisingly, High Growth businesses spend slightly less than the average business on marketing. You'd intuitively expect that High Growth businesses (in this case growing @ 20% plus pa over 2 years) would be spending disproportionately more. However the survey indicated that these " High Growth " businesses spent only 4.9% of their revenues on marketing as opposed to 5.1% for the average business.

This leads to the obvious question; how do they do that? Whilst I have no empirical evidence I can anecdotally, at least, support this finding. If I look at those High Growth businesses I've worked with virtually all of them spent much less on marketing than you’d expect. Having looked into this further it seems to me that many High Growth businesses have accidentally locked on to something which fits the market demands better than the competition and the clarity of their proposition has got prospects pounding at their door. 

I can think of two obvious examples; one a construction business that is currently experiencing an 80%pa growth over this year and forecasting similar next with no marketing spend at all. In fact they are receiving so many enquiries that they are hard pressed to respond at all.  Looking at it for the first time you might even think that their sales process was broken. Yet despite all of that their growth is and continues to be phenomenal. Why, "word of mouth". They will move heaven and earth to get things right first time. This attitude marks them out from their competition and keeps both existing and new customers approaching them for proposals.

The second is a services business which has landed several strategic contracts with some very high profile companies in the UK, with no formal sales function and more startlingly having no one with any formal sales training. Its success once again appears purely based on what it can deliver and “word of mouth” from a couple of existing clients.

What I find interesting is that the results of this report suggest that a business’s success has much more to do with how well they had thought through why and how they deliver their product or service and their value proposition and much less to do with the size of their wallet.

For a full download of the Hinge Marketing report click here.

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services to the Small and Medium Business including Managing High Growth, Business Turnaround, and Mentoring. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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How Poor Recruitment Kills High Growth

Recruiting is often overlooked as a major limiting factor to sustaining high growth, but it is often at this hurdle that high growth businesses fall over. To meet the growing needs of your business you will have to be successful in recruiting and retaining staff. In order to achieve this you will need to consider two critical factors. 

Poor integration of new hires is an unnecessary drag on growth

Firstly, that you have an effective recruitment process and secondly, how quickly you can assimilate new employees into the business.This post recruitment activity is a fundamental driver to sustaining high growth. Get it wrong, or do it poorly and you'll struggle to sustain any sort of growth at all.

This article is not intending to go into detail about the processes you may want to adopt but rather to highlight the implications of getting it wrong. The two issues we're looking at are recruiting the wrong people and the impact of not being able to integrate them into your business, and how these factors if not addressed act as a stall on growth.

The Recruitment Process

Firstly, as the title indicates, you should a have a process. Not a hand crafted set of actions but a repeatable process. This, amongst other things gives you consistency and quality control. When recruiting you should consider two things, how well the candidate will fit into your organisation and their capability or skills to do the job. 

I deliberately put fit first; if you are growing fast and taking people on you don't want them to be antagonising the rest of the team, you want them to fit right in. Only after you are confident of their fit should you investigate their capability.  Getting fit right first will increase the speed with which they are assimilated into the business, the quicker this happens the more staff you can recruit before they create a drag on your business.

Integrating New Recruits into the Business

Once recruited you should consider how quickly you can integrate this new recruit into your business. I think we would all accept that there is a period after you take on a new employee where they act as a drag on your resources rather than contributing to it. This is normally seen as on the job training. How effective you are in bringing new employees up to speed and integrating them into your business will determine the rate with which you can recruit to support growth. So like recruiting you need a post recruitment integration process

The two key factors in a post recruitment process are training and a culture process, which is about the alignment of values.  

If you have no post recruitment process or, more politely, an informal one, it will take you a long time to get returns from your new recruit. Typically you'll see a lot of frustration in the business as the new employee is largely left to their own devices and the necessary training comes in fits and starts with little or no coherence. This makes it more difficult for the new starter to:

1) learn enough about his job to be a net contributor to the business; and

2) integrate into the company, that is absorb and identify with the companies aims and culture. 

The consequences are often:

1) the new hire leaves because they've become disillusioned with your company (what a waste of time and effort) 

2) your existing staff see taking on new staff as a chore and therefore don't put in the effort they should, often resulting in the new employee becoming disillusioned and leaving. 

Even if they stay, the whole process has been unsatisfactory for everybody and will have inevitably consumed more resources that it should and taken much longer that it needed to. In a high growth environment it simply leads to an unacceptable drag on growth.

The culture process or alignment of values is equally, if not more important than the training. It's crucial to get new staff who share the businesses' cultural values.

I'm sure at this point there are some of you are scratching your head at the moment and are saying to themselves but I'm only looking to recruit 1 or 2 people a year; what's the problem? My answer is that whilst the numbers are low a new recruit will most likely be a member of a small team. This is where being a small number works against you. Think of the recruit as a percentage of your workforce; if it's 5 a new recruit represents about 20% and if its 10 its 10%. Now image the damage to your business if 20% of your workforce were not engaged with the business. Worse still, what if that new recruit is actively trying to promote an entirely alien set of values to the rest of your team, think about the disruption then.

To mitigate against this problem your post recruitment process must include an amount of orientation about how you do things in your business and what is and what is not acceptable. It is inevitable that new recruits are going to question what you do and why you do it, either because they are likely to have come from a business that did things differently or because they are interested in how your business does things. Either way you need to have an answer.

At some time you will get a recruitment wrong, however if you don't have a recruitment or integration process you will make more mistakes and have created a lot more unnecessary problems for your business. 

If you would like to find out more us and how we can support your business, you can contact us via Exigent Consulting or Managing High Growth,  We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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Do You Have What it Takes to Run a High Growth Business?

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There is a lot of interest these days about growth in the economy and providing support for high growth businesses. The latest is the Growth Accelerator Programme, and the objective of this initiative is to drive employment growth; and this is based on one key statistic. That is high growth (read 20%+ per annum growth) businesses represent roughly 5% of all companies but drive about 50% of all employment growth.

As the economy remains sluggish, more and more focus is going to be placed on these companies as they are our best chance of dragging ourselves out of the economic doldrums we find ourselves in. Being a high growth business is not easy in fact its a challenging environment in which to live. There are none the less a lot of ambitious business owners who would like to have a high growth business.

So what are the key things to have in place to give yourself the best chance of making it as a high growth business?

The first thing is ambition, no ambition, no growth it's about as basic as it gets.

With ambition comes the drive and the will to change things and to take that step into the unknown.

Having some sort of vision for your business. Its great if you can articulate it clearly and succinctly. A colleague of mine says that if you can't describe your business (why you do what you do) in 10 seconds there you don't understand it enough. I'm not sure I entirely agree as I have met many high growth business owners who are somewhat surprised to themselves heading such businesses. Nevertheless knowing where you are going and why you are going there will provide a focus to your activities

Third is leadership. The ability to inspire others be they your staff or customers. You act as a lightning rod for their ambitions and desires and so carry them forward. Even when things look dark and foreboding people will follow you as you can convince them that this is the right way. You create loyalty amongst your staff and customers which is necessary to underpin long term high growth.

Fourth and lastly at least in my book is Management. The high growth environment is relentless is its pursuit of weaknesses in a business. To survive and be successful you need to have the talent in your management team to take the business forward. This is particularly relevant as the business owner will become more and more remote to the business detail as it grows and will become increasingly reliant on his management team to deliver the goods.   

This list is by no means exhaustive but these, are for me at least, the key attributes that a company needs to be successful as a high growth business. What do you think?

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Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Businesses, Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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The Stresses and Challenges of Managing a High Growth Business

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Choosing to follow a path of high growth is not always a conscious decision. I have met many businesses who find themselves in a phase of high growth and whose owners are looking around wondering how they got there. However in order to continue to achieve high growth they must get to grips with the business and understand why they are successful. This can be stressful in its own right because, if they don’t know why they are successful, they won’t know what to do to rectify the situation if things suddenly start to go wrong.

Operating in a high growth environment is living with relentless pressure, as high growth will seek out any weakness in a business and magnify its defects until resolved. The pressure for all high growth businesses owners is akin to that of patrolling the perimeter of a large defensive position, where one is constantly on the lookout for breaches and attempting to repair them as quickly as possible to prevent further problems later.

One of the most common causes of stress is where the owner is not in full control of the business. I often recognise this when the owner comes out with statements like “I feel the business is running me” or “I’m running through treacle, the harder I work the less progress I make”. As decisions and issues pile up, the business owner starts to become more and more reactive and as such, loses the ability to direct the business. Sadly this situation, if left unchecked, has only one result. There will come a point where the backlog of issues create a tipping point and the wheels come off; often in the most spectacular way, with growth hitting a virtual brick wall resulting in little, none or even negative growth in the following 12-18 months.

Another common reason for stress in high growth businesses is that the underlying rate of growth in the business tends to towards a similar rate of change as new positions, recruitment, and management structures are implemented to support the underlying growth. This means a lot of decisions have to be made to drive the business forward and the business owner will, without doubt, make some bad decisions. This in itself creates the need to take more decisions to correct mistakes. Many business owners need to realise that it is more important to make a decision even though it might be wrong, than to sit on it and hope the problem goes away. It never does, and like many things in life, consciously doing nothing only makes the situation worse.

The key challenge for any high growth business is for the management to be able to look forward and foresee potential issues and problems. In order to do this effectively a number of things need to be in place, the business needs sufficiently detailed information to understand and monitor the key linkages in its business and that this information is available in a timely manner. By that, I mean very quickly. In the business I worked in, for example, we had what we called a flash (rough cut) sales figure for the previous month available on 1^st of the following month. Detailed management accounts were available by the end of the first week of the following month.  For many businesses this might either been seen as the Holy Grail or unnecessary, but it is fundamental to the success of a high growth businesses.

One of the less obvious but nonetheless significant challenges to assist management to look forward and make the appropriate decisions is one of culture. A healthy culture is absolutely fundamental to a successful high growth strategy, as individuals and teams need to grow rapidly to support and continue to promote the strategy of business growth. Staff and management will be in an almost continuous state of learning and development – that means more mistakes. In order to learn and develop, the culture must promote a team approach and not condemn people for getting things wrong. In a recent article I explained at last that there were hard numbers which reinforce what we always suspected; that healthy cultures deliver better business performance.

This article might have given you the impression that you would have to be slightly mad to want to choose a high growth strategy. There is no doubt that a high growth environment is a challenging place to be, it does however have its rewards for those who successfully master the conditions. Those who succeed in a high growth environment represent the best of business leaders and managers and whilst successful high growth businesses represent only 6% of all businesses in the UK, they contribute 45% of UK employment growth. Such companies are a vital resource, that need to be supported and encouraged and whilst difficulties are many the potential rewards are much greater.

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Business, Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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Make Better Management Decisions In a High Growth Business

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The most common issue that business owners and managers face in a high growth business is the lack of time to make decisions or consider situations. As I have repeated on many occasions business owners as managers find ways to make time not by working harder but by working smarter. We all know that high growth puts relentless pressure on a business and it will seek out any weakness in management or the business and mercilessly exploit that weakness until it is fixed or it ruins the business.

The problem for management in this environment is that decisions and problems arrive all to frequently and they can't be left to fester. How does management cope with this onslaught. The answer is to try to grade the importance of the decisions they have to make. The problem with many firms is that the management team will tend to deal with the issues with giving much thought to priority. This often that means the easy decisions are made quickly but those more difficult and complex decisions are left, this results in a backlog, of often, very important issues.

Having faced this problem myself I have of found this simple chart has enabled me to get to the most important decision first, and not to get distracted by the constant stream of the quick and easy.

I give this diagram to all my clients although it is most relevant to those managing high growth businesses. The objective is to get you to think about the type of tasks you undertake and if they are really necessary.

Taking the two left hand boxes it is obvious that undertaking urgent and important tasks are necessary, and it should also be clear that items that are neither important or urgent should be ignored. However we commonly find that a surprising number of people are doing work in this category; because it tends to be full of quick, easy and repetitive tasks so that it can appear that you've got through a lot of work, unfortunately they are of little value. You should avoid these type of tasks at all costs as they are time wasters.

Of the two right hand boxes the Urgent but not Important quadrant is where we spend too much of our time. We tend to assume that if something is urgent it is naturally important. This is not the case. You should try asking yourself “what are the consequences if I don’t do this”? In a surprising number of cases the answer is not much. If that’s your conclusion then focus on tasks that are really important.

The Important but not Urgent category, is by contrast, where we spend less time than we should. A typical example is creating a strategic plan or a marketing or business plan. Yes it’s important but somehow we never get around to it soon enough because it is rarely urgent, and so we fill our time up will urgent tasks instead.

I have had many clients who have found that using this analysis before launching into their activities has transformed the effectiveness of their effort enabling them to make a much stronger contribution to the business by focusing on what is really important rather an what is urgent.

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Business , Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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Healthy Culture Delivers Better Business Performance

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Business performance and culture have always been linked, although its tended to be anecdotal evidence rather than hard statistics. I myself as part of our High Growth Programme spend some time on the importance of understanding your culture and analysing if it is suitable and desirable for your business going forward. I wrote about these issues on using culture as a support to high growth and culture as a weapon for competitive advantage. Whilst there is little doubt the having the right culture is an important factor in improving your business performance it remains an area that most smaller business owners tend to avoid. It is fair to say that much of this is because business advice and support tends to look at the process driven solutions for business rather than addressing the more difficult area of people, their values and motivations. 


It has always been my contention that getting your organisational culture right will improve your competitive performance and support a company's high growth aspirations because they empower people to be courageous and offer sultions and challenge norms without fear of reprisals or blame. 

Up until now there has not been any hard numbers to support this view. However last June an article was published in McKinseys Quarterly which had actually put numbers to the importance of culture in business performance. As can be seen in the diagram above business performance addressing change plus a healthy culture outperformed poor cultures by as much as 2.2x. This is I expect the first of many such studies as the recognition thart culture plays an important part in supporting a companys success becomes a topic at the centre of a CEO's radar.

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Business , Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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Culture - Getting the One You Want

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This short article will give you practical steps to identify the culture you have now and the culture you would like to have to support you as a high growth business.  We have talked earlier about the importance of a strong company culture in a high growth business and how it should be a critical part of your business strategy as it can provide real competitive advantage.

Whilst many owners in high growth businesses understand the need for a strong company culture, their business have developed without any clear focus on this aspect. There is a need therefore for a simple process to identify he differences between the culture you have now to the culture you want, and identify how to go from one to the other.

It is worth repeating that if you run a business you will have a culture. You get this by default, your company culture will be created by your values and the values of your employees. Those with the strongest personality or who are the most vocal will tend to create a dominant culture. To enable you as an owner of high growth businesses to grow faster for longer getting the right culture is a must.

Step 1 Find out what you have now. 

The simplest way to do this is for you to identify the 3 to five words which you think together describe your company culture, so for example; honesty, reliability, easy to do business with, supportive, positive.

Step 2 Find out if your staff agree

Produce a list of maybe 15 to 20 words and include you 5 initial words in that list. Ask your staff to highlight 5 words which they think best describes the company culture. By the way make sure the response to this survey is anonymous otherwise you'll have staff telling what they think you want to hear, rather than what they really think.

Step 3 Analyse the results

You are most likely to get one of three results

(a) there is a lot of similarity between your view of your company culture and that of your staff

(b) there doesn't seem to be any prevailing view of your culture amongst your employees. This suggests what ever your culture is, it is weak.

(c) your employees have a completely different view of your company's culture from you.

Step 4 Identify the culture you want

Using the same technique as in step 1. Find a few keywords that will identify your new culture.

Step 5 Create culture champions

As a busy owner of a high growth business you don't have either the time or the capability on your own to change your staffs attitudes. You will need the help of other key members of the team to become "cultural champions" to keep reinforcing the new cultural message. 

Step 6 Implement your new culture

Encourage and support your cultural champions to work with your staff to implement those changes into you company culture. Where are you most likely to be successful? Recruitment is great starting point as you can filter out those potential staff who like and agree with your culture. As I have stated before this is especially important in a high growth business as new recruits become productive faster.

This last step may take some time depending on how different it its from your current culture. Don't let that put you off as evidence has shown that a high growth business with a strong supportive culture will grow faster and for longer than a business which has not.

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Business , Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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The Problems of Managing High Growth

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I am departing from my usual form of posting to include a link to an excerpt from a recent Webinar on managing high growth businesses. This short section, about 5 minutes, explores the problems of managing high growth and the consequences if not managed properly. 

As this is not my usual form I am especially interested in our feedback as it will help me decide i this approach is worth adopting for future posts.

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Business , Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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Managing a High Growth Business: Getting your Vision Right

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Image via    Wikipedia

Getting Your Vision Right 

I have worked with many high growth businesses and contrary to much of the published research it is clear that many owners of successful and high growth businesses do not have a clear vision of where they want to go or indeed and why they should need  to know.  Many of the business owners I have worked would describe themselves as accidental success stories. That is to say they can't explain why their business is consistently successful or what actions they put in place got them to where they are now. However what is common, they all recognise that this is not a satisfactory state of affairs. Formalising their thoughts into a vision is not just an academic exercise it is important to be able to articulate why you are business. 

A vision is not about targets or goals, it is about the reason you are in business for example Disney's vision is simply "To make people happy" Whilst Google's is "Make internet advertising better - less intrusive, more effective, and more useful" Kelloggs is  "To be the food company of choice"

You will all have some kind of vision in your head but to communicate it effectively to your staff and the outside world it needs to be put down on paper, in doing so it will help you clarify your vision. You will see from the examples I have shown that a company vision is not about targets or goals but why you do what you do and how you do it. It should not change and it should be just as valid whether you are a 5 person company or a 5000 person company. It should be timeless.

Getting your vision right is important for any business, but for a fast growing business it is essential. Having a vision will provide the common sense of direction that will focus peoples’ activities to the benefit of the business. This common purpose is vital for the maintaining of consistent fast growth.

Related articles

• Three tips to clarify your vision (iowabiz.com)

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Business , Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help Business Owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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Managing a High Growth Business: Its the Culture, Stupid!

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Culture is one of the most under rated aspects influencing a business. Get it right and you can support and promote cooperation to support and reinforce success. Get it wrong and you can say goodbye to a successful business and say hello to a world of hurt.

Image via Wikipedia

BRITISH POET AND CRITIC MATTHEW ARNOLD
VIEWED "CULTURE" AS THE CULTIVATION
 OF THE HUMANIST IDEAL.

Every business has a culture whether you know it or not, whether you've consciously tried to set one or not.  Culture is set the day you start a business as it is a reflection of you, the owner, your values and personality. So if you like playing politics, politics will become an integral part of the business. Your values on customer service, sales, staff management in fact everything you do in business both internally and externally is influenced, if not dictated, by your culture.

Given its importance why is Culture not higher up on the list of things to explore when building a business.  In fact it’s often completely overlooked. The reason for this I would suggest is that the critical impact that Culture has on a business is not well understood. It is often completely overlooked by advisers and start ups alike, under the misguided impression that culture is something for a big business to consider. This totally ignores the fact that having the wrong culture is likely to prevent you from getting to a big company in the first place.    It is also because Culture is one of those soft touchy feely issues that tend to be avoided by by business people and is shunned by an ever more materialistic society. This is not intended to be a commentary on the importance of culture in our society but rather impact ignorance as an owner of what your business culture is and what it should be.

Taking this analysis further; incompatible cultures, or rather a lack of interest by the sellers of business and ignorance of the importance by buyers is the number 1 reason why so many acquisitions fail or at least fail to deliver a significant portion of the expected benefits. More worryingly ignorance of the importance of culture is the most common reason why the cost of integration is substantially more than projected.

How do you identify your culture?

This is a two step process. Firstly identify what you would like your culture to be then secondly ask your staff what they think it is. In order to make it easier for your staff to explain what they think is the company culture, distil the description of your culture into a few words. So for example; customer service, quality and price. Also recognise that the order of the words indicates their importance. For example a business with the keyword priority customer service, quality and price will have a significantly different culture to a business whose keyword priority is price, quality and customer service. Try it, you’ll find the answer illuminating.

If the culture is not what we want, how do we change it?

Changes in culture are notoriously difficult to implement because we are trying to change people’s attitudes. Change starts with you, as in all probability, you created the original by your actions or the appearance of your actions.

Step 1 clearly define what you want your culture to be in as much detail as possible, explain your rationale, then go on to describe how you will expect your management and staff to act. Then you follow a long process of reinforcing the culture across the business, but how you do this is the subject of a future article.

Related articles

• The success of Oracle's acquisition of RightNow will reside in the details (forbes.com)
• Culture or business? (rolanfest.wordpress.com)

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Business , Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help Business Owners improve the profit performance of their business.  

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Managing a High Growth Business: The Problems of Badly Managed Growth

Running a high growth business, requires a good deal of planning, and active management. It also requires a longer term view, unfortunately in very many cases fast growth happens by accident and therefore without sufficient planning to maintain growth and certainly not as a result of any long term view.  


Never is this more relevant than when talking about plans for growth. The chart explains what happens all too frequently during a period of high growth. This is that after a year of rapid growth the organisation struggles resulting in little or negative growth for the next 18 month to 2 years before resuming . This is extremely stressful for businesses and often results in management backing away from further high growth because of the difficulties experienced 


These difficulties include :

1. Huge effort from owners and staff delivering little or no rewards
2. Minimal or even negative financial returns as the cost of correcting the consequences wipe out most or all of the financial gains.
3. Deteriorating customer relationships because service levels cant keep up with revenues.
4. Low staff morale leading to lower productivity and high staff attrition which is made worse because typically that attrition is made up with a disproportionate amount of your best people.
5. Finally lost opportunity as management adopt a very cautious growth strategy because their experience of high growth was so painful.

It needn't be the case, making sure you manage the special circumstances that come with a high growth business you can maintain consistent growth over a longer period and consequently become a larger business more quickly and with much less pain.
  

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Business , Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help Business Owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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