Built to Grow
A Survival Manual for Growing Companies
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As a company gets bigger, communication both within and between departments suffers. Ultimately, no one knows what’s going on in other parts of the company. And what was once a well-oiled, integrated machine becomes a company in chaos. Read More
Effective managers are the single most important factor in engaging employees, motivating employees, and building a productive workplace. Yet the lack of managerial depth is a serious problem for growing organizations. A firm’s ability to grow is directly related to its ability to add managerial capacity to support its growth. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More
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... Read More
