Friday, November 03, 2017

How to grow your business NOW!

“All businesses start as an idea, an opportunity, or a hunch.”

“But as a business grows, it has to shed the startup phase of gut instinct and guesswork. Founders need to embrace an ever-evolving framework of processes and systems – such as accounting, human resources and even internal communications – to ensure that work started by just one or two people can be understood and consistently supported by employees and associates of all different levels and backgrounds.”

This was the opening of my four-part Financial Post series last month on “scaling”. That’s the process we used to call “managing growth,” before Silicon Valley found a cooler buzzword.

I wrote four stories for the National Post on different aspects of managing your company’s growth, oops, I mean scaling. VCs use this term to describe how tech startups can master the path to global success, but these stories are meant for any business leader trying to get ahead of the competition.

Hopefully that includes just about everybody.

Here are the yarns you should check out:

Scaling your family business

Scaling fast and slow

Managing the baffling logistics of scaling

The secret of scaling: managing three businesses at the same time.
-        the business as it is (current state);
-        the business it will become over the next year (next-state);
-        and the business you think it could become in five years (long-term).

Plus: The LazaridisInstitute’s Scale-Up Program is exploring the right way to help promising companies learn to scale. Here’s what their test entrepreneurs learned in Year One.