Category Archives: Company Building

The bigger a company gets, and the faster it’s growing, the harder it is to get everybody on the same page. The issue is that there probably isn’t an easily understood page to get everyone on. In all likelihood there are many pages, actual and mental, together with meeting notes and emails, each intended to explain the vision, mission, and strategy of your business. Furthermore, most of these messages are full of unclear or even conflicting statements concerning who your company is, what it does, and how it does it.

Understanding roles and responsibilities is pretty clear in a small organization. But as a company gets bigger, things that were understood as a matter of course must be made explicit. Everyone in an organization needs to know who is responsible for what and who has the authority for what. Unclear responsibility is one of the most common pitfalls in a growing business. Show me a rapidly growing organization and I'll show you managers with misaligned goals and vague responsibility.

Making and executing decisions is much harder in a complex organization than it is in a simple one. When companies are small, decisions are made quickly, usually informally, by a small number of people, and they are easily understood. The results are generally apparent and when a decision doesn’t produce the anticipated result, changes are made until the desired outcome is produced. As a result, small companies are typically lean and agile, and they give customers what they want.

High-growth companies are particularly prone to fire fighting. People rush from crisis to crisis; not ending one before another pops up. Real problem solving is replaced with Band Aids. Productivity slides. Managing becomes a constant juggling act of deciding where to assign overworked people and which developing crisis can be ignored until tomorrow.

When a company is young and beginning to grow it’s simple – it’s “us versus the world.” Then the company gets bigger, more people and layers are added, the shared culture gets diluted, and the tendency shifts toward internal competition, political infighting, and aggressive protection of self-interests. It’s a theme that appears in all growing organizations, and smart leaders recognize that "us versus them" behavior will ultimately destroy a company.

Growing companies tend to be full of uncertainty and ambiguity caused by constantly changing employees, job demands, structures, systems, products, and markets. Uncertainty can and does create problems.

Most people view luck in one of two ways, both at the extreme ends of the spectrum. First, some see luck as the explanation for extraordinary success. These people see big winners as those that beat the odds; they see winning as random chance. The second view is that luck plays no role in success at all. Folks in this camp see skill, preparation, determination, and hard work as the reasons for success. People with this view totally dismiss the role luck played in their success and take every bit of the credit themselves.

This is the final post in a five part series introducing the four stages of business growth. If attaining growth is hard, then sustaining it is even harder. After successfully scaling the company, your organization must make sure that it is able to sustain its growth over the long term.

This is the fourth post in a five part series introducing the four stages of business growth. The Rapid Growth stage is where the organization’s past and future collide. On the surface, the only apparent difference between a start-up and a large company is the amount of revenue and market share. But it’s not that simple.

This is the third post in a five part series introducing the four stages of business growth. The Early Growth stage builds on the company’s success in Stage One. The company has established a perfect fit between its product and the needs of the market, developed a sales process, and identified a set of initial pilot customers that can serve as valuable references. Now it’s time to launch the company and focus on sales. The primary objective of the Early Growth Stage...