Has your business been making steady progress yet you’ve been feeling you could ramp up from a small business to a mid-sized one by buying one or two competitors, complete with staff?
Today I pose some questions for you to consider regarding expanding your business.
–How ready is your current business to double or treble in size?
–Are all your systems in place?
–Are you clear on your future organisational structure and what needs to be in place to get where you want to go?
Leadership and people management are going to be key. You can have great entrepreneurial skill and fantastic technicians, but you also need tremendous management skills to tie the two together. Every business – even in the same field – has a different way of doing things.
Be aware of the pitfalls of blending cross cultures. Do you have a clear strategy to merge the cultures and do it in such a way that everyone is comfortable and still feels reasonably safe and willing to buy into your vision and way of doing things? Mergers, particularly with smaller businesses where everyone knows everyone else, are like impending marriages. Once you have identified your prospective ‘partner’, spend some time getting to know them. In other words, date first, then get engaged and learn more about each other before walking down the aisle.
Do you have training systems in place? How are you going to position the change with the clients so they still feel important and cared for? The last thing you want is a mass migration of unhappy clients. With the right elements in place, your strategy can certainly ramp your business up.
A note about our coaching:
A coach’s role is not to ‘tell’, it’s more about introducing sound business principles and asking the right questions to stimulate the client’s thinking to lead them to uncovering or developing the right solution for their business. In our coaching business we are principles-based rather than formula-based. That is to say, instead of taking either a “best-practices” template, or the “cookie-cutter” model (one-size-fits-all) and imposing it on our clients, we want them to understand the underlying business principles and then work with those principles and apply them so that they have a solution specifically tailored to their own business. In this way, both the business and the client can reach their full potential.
Until next time…
P.S. Learn more about working ON your business–talk to the coach! Click here to connect with me!