By Tina Zawila
Over the last six weeks Joe Smith and I have delivered a series of workshops for Gladstone Engineering Alliance, sponsored by METS, for a small group of growing businesses. The focus of the program was on Scaling Up.
When it’s time to take your business to the next level, it’s very important that you understand the four fundamentals of scaling up and they must be mastered to be successful.
1. People
You must have a great team around you and be able to lead them in a powerful way towards your vision for your business. It’s a bit like parenting – you need to establish a handful of rules, repeat yourself a lot, and act consistently with those rules. You must establish your core values and not negotiables and let those values guide all the relationship decisions and systems in the business.
2. Strategy
When setting your strategic vision for the future, make sure it first passes two tests – does what you’re doing really matter enough to customers; and secondly does it differentiate you from your competition? Once you’ve determined your strategy, you must be laser focused on executing your plan.
3. Execution
In driving execution implement three key habits; set a handful of priorities (the fewer the better); gather quantitative and qualitative data daily and review weekly to guide decisions; and establish an effective daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meeting rhythm to keep everyone in the loop. Those who pulse faster, grow faster.
4. Cash (and profit) In managing cash, don’t run out of it! This means paying as much attention to how every decision affects cash flow as you would to revenue and profitability. It’s critical that you can understand and interpret your financial reports and that you know profit does not equal cash! You must understand, measure and manage the key drivers in your business.
The other key to successfully scaling your business is having a trusted advisor who can guide and support you, who can help you interpret your results as you go along and keep you accountable to your actions and projects to achieve your strategic plan.
If you need help scaling up your business call the professional team at UHY Haines Norton, we have experienced, professional advisors ready to help you take your business to the next level.