Longer View Focus Critical Now: Remember the Buggy Whip?

Stage 6, with 96 to 160 employees requires a longer, more strategic focus for the leader and a laser-like focus on your ability to connect to your employees.

Remember the buggy whip? Some would say the buggy whip business didn't last because the buggy whip became obsolete when the automobile was introduced. But that's not why they went out of business.

They went out of business because they were strategically confused about what business they were in. They didn't understand that they were in the transportation support business.

With this mindset, they could have continued to expand their line of products. Instead, they simply faded into history.

To survive, many businesses evolve and through the years respond to the needs of clients. Responding to the needs of your clients is a good thing.

Not having a strong strategic focus in this critical stage of growth is a bad thing. Why? Because you can no longer afford to be all things to all people. Your ability to differentiate yourself from the competition, while always important from a marketing perspective, has hit a crucial need.

It shifted for me when we were bidding on a large identity package for a Fortune 500 client. At that time, as a marketing communications company, our focus was on identity packages, website development, and marketing strategy. It was business as usual as we compiled the data for the request for proposal. In a follow up call with the potential client we discovered one of our competitors was one of the largest and most respected branding agencies in the country. Mindset shift.

We had to strategically rethink our positioning in the market. We had not considered ourselves a branding agency and our materials did not do us justice in this arena. Needless to say we lost the bid but learned a critical lesson. We were no longer a big fish in a small pond. We were now a small fish in a much bigger pond and our ability to survive just took on a different focus.

The leader's role as you move into this stage of growth has to be on creating a strategic vision that moves you farther into the future. The distribution of authority and accountability also becomes a major challenge and the leader needs to establish:

-- A very clear vision for the organization
-- A strong set of core values
-- A clearly defined dominate company culture
-- A powerful strategic plan that reaches out over two to five years

Strategic focus will not work without the buy-in of your leadership team and your entire company. Stage 6 provides you the opportunity to tune into the perspectives of your company. Listening and learning at this stage of growth will reward an emotionally connected leader with strong growth, targeted planning and engaged employees.

Stage 6 Leadership Rules of the Road -- 96 to 160 employees:

Rule #1: Without fail, establish a 2 to 3 day new staff orientation.

-- develop a two day new staff orientation to include core values, master processes and cultural norms

-- test this new staff orientation program with a pilot employee group

-- set orientation program benchmark by sending all employees through orientation program

Rule #2: Generate a 3-year living business plan to address strategic, operational and people considerations.

-- have your leadership team research a three year forward view of customers, competitors, markets, product/service offerings, company capacity

-- have your leadership team create a three year planning process based on the operational, strategic and people considerations uncovered in their research

-- create a tactical plan that is integrated with the company budget, department budgets and revenue group forecasts

Rule #3: Implement an organizational health survey once a year and establish one to two company-wide unifying events a year.

-- deliver a comprehensive organizational survey to access the anonymous employee company perspective

-- organize and executive an all-employee unifying event

-- choose the ten most pressing issues from the survey, frame into initiatives and communicate to all employees at the unifying event

Rule #4: Establish advanced financial systems.

-- establish integrated accounts payable and receivable systems

-- create an integrated financial reporting system for all revenue groups, cost of goods, product performance and gross profitability

-- establish three levels of profit/loss and balance sheet reporting - data entry, summary roll up and master sheet levels

Rule #5: Without fail, secure regular one-on-one supervisor/employee meetings

-- secure and reinforce monthly supervisor/employee one-on-one meetings

-- secure and reinforce feedback and performance phases in one-on-one meeting template

-- secure and reinforce employee development in the one-on-one meeting template

The concepts behind understanding how a company moves through different stages of growth have helped hundreds of CEOs get ahead of their own growth curve. The basics of the 7 Stages of Growth enterprise development model shows that as a company adds employees the complexity level increases. It's that complexity that a CEO can get ahead of and start managing their growth proactively.

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