It may come as a surprise to many, but too much success too soon can result in a company’s failure. That’s often because the company out-runs its ability to sustain and control that success, and a decline follows.
Say, for instance, that an organisation reaches increasingly higher sales targets, but its infrastructure doesn’t scale at the same rate. Inconsistencies and weaknesses begin to appear in its management systems. Quality suffers, and, eventually, the positive trend plateaus and tips downwards.
The answer? Don’t misjudge the impact that business and management can have on realising a sustainable growth strategy. The systems you have in place today may not work when addressing new challenges – or, they may make it next to impossible for you to meet them.
If your organisation is on a growth path, consider these six elements:
1. The right talent
Develop a management system that measures accountability against specific standards and ensures that the quality of your products and services doesn’t waver. As service quality often depends on human capital, you’ll need the right mix of people at every level.
Give non-management employees the autonomy to contribute positively, and recognise them for it. They’ll reward you with good outcomes and ensure that the foundation of your growth is that much sturdier, while developing a robust working environment.
Identify the people in your organisation whose roles will be most affected by your expansion, and enable them to take initiative outside of their standard work requirements. This way, they’re more likely to get involved and help you to create new cross-organisational systems that address tasks in parallel.
2. Controlling quality
It’s easy to lose track of quality when your business is growing speedily, so give the task of maintaining quality to a loyal management team. Assign them the responsibility for overseeing everything from product development to internal systems and manufacturing.
It’s also important for you to remember that service-based organisations face quality concerns as they grow, and that finding the right talent (see Element #1 above) can be as limiting as a blockage in a production line.
3. Processes that scale
Make sure that your processes and projects are executed in the same way every time. Don’t let your systems become un-scalable; establish which ones are most likely to come under strain as the company expands.
4. Manage cashflow
Numbers never lie. When your company is growing, beware of the danger of spending more than you can afford. More oversight or adjustments may be necessary to increase effectiveness, quality, and sales.
When determining if you’re going to front-load your capital investment, be confident that cash is coming into your account as a result of the investment. Remember that cash profits and accounting profit are very different. Cash profits are your bread and butter.
If you aren’t positioned to finance your own expansion and you require outside funding, carefully consider the pros and cons of getting into debt, as well as the length of the loan and interest rate.
5. Finding investors
Conduct detailed research into potential investors, as each will have sector or industry interests, investment mandates, and value preferences. Pinpoint these, assimilate with them, and make sense of them before engaging.
Then, make the effort to thoroughly evaluate the potential investor. Do this by first determining where your interests are aligned and then uncovering:
- The source of the investors’ capital
- Their investment track records
- The returns that they usually aim for
- Their traditional risk profiles
- Their investment mandates.
6. Communicating culture
Spend as much time determining, sharing, and entrenching your company’s current and growing culture as you do addressing your growth strategy.
With each new stage of growth, commit time and resources into making sure that the cultures of different departments don’t implode when put together – impacting on customers, important employees, or worse.
Make your employees aware of what the future will hold, how it is likely to affect them, and what the bigger picture looks like.
In essence…
No matter the size of your business or what your growth plans are, expansion can expose you to a host of risks. These may be existing problems that worsen, or new ones that are uncovered for the first time. Either way, it’s crucial that you identify them, prepare for them, and make plans to protect yourself in the face of growth.