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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Managing A High Growth Business : Matching Your Organisation to Your Sales

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 Growth Businesses Organisational Stress Points

This is the first in a series of posts concerning the successful management of high growth businesses. One of the most common problems high growth businesses face is how to match organisational growth with sales. 

The Problem 

Simply put sales can grow discretely and tends to be quite smooth as shown as the red curve. Organisations growth, by contrast, tends to be much more lumpy. This is because a certain staffing complement has a finite growth capacity and beyond that point just adding people doesn't help. In fact at some point adding people reduces performance. What is required is an organisational restructure which will create a step change in a companies ability to support its growth. However this is not easy to accomplish because most SME's address this problem too late. This often results in business growth reverting to the typical "lumpy" organisational restructure rather than a smooth increase. The reason for this is that sales now have to wait for the organisation to catch up so you tend to end up with a year of rapid growth followed by a year or even more of no or even negative growth.

Typical Situations

Smaller Businesses tend to rely too heavily on a few key people, this results in a stagnation of performance of the remaining staff who have little or no chance to develop their skills. So when the time comes to reorganise the business owners or management are reluctant to make the step change necessary to reorganise the business because they cant see who, apart from the usual suspects, who will be able to take on additional responsibility.  What this results in is either a re-oganisation which is often half hearted or too late.  To provide a sporting analogy, hammer throwers are always told that they must remain ahead of the hammer. So as they speed up their revolutions in the circle they can properly time an effective throw. Small businesses rather like a novice hammer thrower end up behind the hammer (read sales growth)  losing control and finding out the hammer is in the wrong place.

The Solution

"Stay ahead of the Hammer!" 

Some key actions:

Always! Always Always! Implement a reorganisation ahead of its need. This gives you time to fine tune it is also the only way you can main that rapid growth.

Establish a model for organisational growth. That is how will your business deal will sustained and rapid growth. Your plan must also be able to estimate at what point (size of revenues) will you be needing to consider the next reorganisation.

Reorganisations must have longevity. Typically a major reorganisation should last about 24 months, with interim adjustments taking place yearly.

Recognise that reorganisations get bigger as you get bigger, so have a post reorganisation quality control process.

Let me know what you think

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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