Sustainable Growth requires Solid Foundations – Are you Prepared?

All business growth is built on a solid foundations, and while you may be leading a successful SME with healthy turnover, a good client base and a sought after product or service, you need to consider whether the foundations of your present business are strong enough to support the pressures and demands of growth.

When most business advisors and coaches talk about being prepared for growth they are talking about business processes and systems that need to be sufficiently robust to accommodate growth, which of course they do.

However, there is another layer of foundation that is often bypassed or taken for granted, yet is fundamental to ongoing successful growth.

That layer is what I describe as your Brand Essence, and includes the ‘why’, or true purpose of your company – it’s reason for being, combined with the ‘who’, which is the personality, or characteristics of the company that demonstrate the differences between you and your competitors.

Whether you have taken the time to articulate it or not, your Brand Essence underpins everything your company does and is particularly important when it comes to building your leadership team/board, hiring staff and developing customer relationships that engender loyalty.   If you can clearly articulate the essence of your brand in recruitment and marketing content you are far more likely to attract colleagues, employees and customers who empathise with your mission and values and choose to work with you because of them.

Conversely, if you don’t take the time to clearly articulate this more intangible aspect of your company, while it is easy to check qualifications, experience and skills of applicants and potential directors,  you have no way of making sure that their ethos and value align with your own.

A story…
A couple of years ago I was invited to be involved with a team who had been brought together to trouble-shoot a London communications company who, in an attempt to grow had taken on 2 new directors with relevant skills, experience and credentials.  Twelve months after the new board came together costs had risen substantially but the company had not grown and remained static.

Cutting a long story short it turned out that the new director who had been taken on specifically to increase sales did not believe in or support the big picture purpose of the company.   The activities that had been initiated by this director conflicted with the culture and ethos of the company, upsetting customers and actually losing sales.  The culture of the company was very supportive to clients, building relationships and doing whatever they could to help clients move their businesses forward, while the culture of the new director was much more directly commercial, wanting to hard sell with offers and create a higher level of short term profit with an increased client-base.

Depending on your business model, neither of these cultures is wrong, but it does not work to try and do both things at the same time.  There was a lack of alignment between the purpose of the new director and the purpose of the company.  As you can probably imagine, they parted company, continuing with three directors and the company went on to thrive and be successful.

I believe that this situation could have been avoided.  If the company had taken the time to discover and articulate their ‘why’ and ‘who’ (see my previous post here for more on this) they would have been able to bench-mark those characteristics and ensured that all key decisions made by the company were in alignment.  Recruitment material and interview questions would use a similar language that represented the essence of the company, attracting the right people and highlighting those who did not fit.

The company’s marketing and sales content would also now reflect the ethos and culture of the company attracting new clients with similar values, which according to case studies leads to more trust, longer client-relationships and ultimately more sales.

If you are in that very positive position of being successful and wanting growth, please give yourself the best chance possible by having all the foundations in place to employ the right people and attract the best customers before you embark on the growth process.