The challenge for high growth companies is how to sustain growth. It's a sad fact that 40% of companies that experience high growth go through a period of contraction immediately afterwards. The issue for High Growth businesses is often not only how to develop sales but more importantly, how to deliver against the increased sales that they've made. Put another way the growth of the organisation to deliver increased sales has fallen behind the rate of growth of sales themselves. This simple imbalance almost inevitably results in a hard landing for the business.
Over the last 5 years, we have developed a model to help High Growth businesses meet this challenge. We call it Staying Ahead of the Hammer. It's based around seven key elements that help business owners understand and prepare for coordinated organisational growth.
Our experience using GrowthAccelerator clients as well as other high growth clients have delivered an average growth rate of nearly 50% with profit growth of 46%. The real value of our approach is to enable sustainability of high growth.
Our approach is based on seven areas. The Keystone is helping businesses develop a Vision for their business. “A vision provides the reason why you are in business and as a decisive leader gives you the direction around which to enthuse your team and your customers.”. Next we get owners to look at the Culture of their business to see if it supports or hinders a high growth environment and the level of employee engagement.
Having looked at what I would call the infrastructure of the business we turn our attention to Strategy and Planning. This section helps Leadership teams build a strategy and just as important develop a process to implement it. “In a High Growth Business you have little time to ponder about what might be happening in your business. Having a clear strategy and an implementation plan gives you detailed landmarks which will quickly identify when things are off course.”
The following four areas the first is Talent Management: “People are a business’s most important asset and recruiting the right people is fundamental to its success. Existing staff will fall into two categories; those who can grow with the business and those who can't. Knowing how to get the most out of these two sets of people is key to any long-term success.”
We move on to Financial Management and Control: “Accurate and timely financial information which goes beyond the basic P&L and Balance Sheet is necessary to enable the owner or his management team to identify issues early enough to take the necessary corrective action.” Decent financial understanding of the business mechanics is a very common weakness in high growth businesses. We help businesses understand that you can't have too much financial information about your business. This is because you often confront problems where you have no information on which to make a decision. In such circumstances, it's almost impossible to make the best choice. We also use this mechanism to help businesses understand the need to look forward as far into the future as they can in order to identify potential issues before the become major problems.
Our penultimate section is on Organisational Efficiency as “There is nothing customers and suppliers hate more than inconsistency in their dealings with a company. The value of processes is that they bring that consistency to the vast majority of interactions and at the same time deliver a framework for increasing company productivity.” We also introduce the idea that businesses should be output driven (KPI's) rather than input driven undirected hard work.
The last area we look at is Business Development. This often because getting sales is the least of the businesses problems. What they do lack is understanding how to reliably forecast sales as “Accuracy in forecasting sales and, therefore, income, is vital to drive the cash flow needed to support a High Growth Business”
The model itself has the flexibility to allow businesses enter at different points depending on what is causing them most pain. Inevitably they will have to come back to the Vision element and work back through the model.
This has been turned into a book which is released on 27th November. It is one of the few comprehensive books on high growth and what it takes to maintain growth over a number of years. Balancing these several elements is what makes this process such a challenge.
For those of you who are interested you can get the book at Staying Ahead of the Hammer .
I look forward to hearing your comments
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