Strategy: Has your company outgrown you?
You’ve managed to transform a great idea into a thriving business. Well done. You deserve these congratulations. However, it seems to be getting harder instead of easier. Why? To make things worse, the team you have built doesn’t seem to share your enthusiasm or put in the hours you do. Can’t they see that this is what it takes to be successful?
There are so many questions that could be asked, but in this blog we will only look at a couple. Why does continuing to grow seem so much harder than starting up? and why don’t your employees and collaborators see it the way you do?. Most importantly, what can you do about it?
Before being able to answer any of these questions there is a more fundamental one to ask yourself. “What is more important to me; is it to see my vision become a sustainable reality, or is it to have personally achieved this vision myself? Is one option more “noble” than the other?. Not at all! Can you achieve both? Realistically only in the early stages of your company’s existence. If you are asking these questions, you have already evolved beyond this point.
There is no right or wrong answer, but you MUST pick one or the other as this will drive all of your subsequent actions.
If you select the first option, you may have to consider passing the daily management to someone better equipped to taking your “baby” and helping it grow to maturity, just as we see often within the sporting world. A talented sportsperson may well change their coach (even if this person is very close) in order to evolve to the next level. The old coach often takes on a more discreet role as mentor and enabler to facilitate the young talent to fulfill his or her potential. A company reacts in a similar way.
If on the other hand you chose option 2 and acknowledge that it is critical to you to be leading the charge, then you may need to revise your vision in order to be able to consider that you have accomplished your goal(s), or to modify your management style to empower your collaborators to do best what you hired them to do. You may also benefit from coaching and support to help develop your own skill sets such as strategy, organizational structure, career paths etc.
Finally let us address the first of our 2 questions. Why is it getting harder? Whilst there are clearly many factors, one of the commonest is that in order to continue to grow you need to penetrate markets that are unfamiliar to you and/or your team. This is not necessarily geographical, but more market-types as your buyer-base changes from technology-driven to pragmatic procurement driven, from people who can see the benefit of your technology to those who are not interested in the technology, only the results. This represents a fundamental change in approach, messaging and organizational understanding. The way that has proved so successful in the past may simply not work in this environment, and so the act of closing a sale seems to become harder, longer and more uncertain. This may be a good time to re-assess your commercial strategy, i.e HOW will we make our targets, as so much has changed.
Our second concern was about why your employees don’t seem to put in the same effort as you. In simple terms this will always be impossible to achieve. The very fact that you are growing your company to deploy your ideas means this is very difficult to share especially as you continue to grow. The alignment will become inevitably diluted.
It is your responsibility to continually ‘sell the dream’ internally even more so then you do externally. You also need to be pragmatic when asking ‘whats in it for them?’. It is quite probable that the good people you have hired have come from larger companies, used to career paths, risk-free remuneration packages, but also slow bureaucratic decision-making and little space for individual innovation. These people were attracted to an environment free of these big-company frustrations, and accepted the lack of career-path, volatile future as the price to pay to enjoy the upside. This is the moment to look in the mirror and ask yourself if you have not lost sight of these critical benefits as you have grown. If you have hired someone who still has a twenty year career in front of them, what can you offer? No-one is better qualified than a founder to keep the dream alive and forefront in your team’s minds as you let them do what you hired them to do.
We have come full circle. The course of action you chose will depend entirely on how you see the future of your dream. This is not an easy question to answer, and you may need coaching yourself to achieve it. However the only option that is NOT acceptable is to avoid the question. If you wont decide, someone else may well decide for you.
