Are You Running Your Business, or is it Running You?

Starting a business is a mix of stressful and fun, especially in the beginning. Once you've found some success, the stress goes away, and things tend to be a lot more fun. As you run the business, you are agile, make decisions quickly, and clients are well taken care of. As things progress, and you gain more and more clients, and you have to hire more and more, that fun feeling goes away.

In the book Predictable Success by Les McKeown, he describes this phase as "Whitewater". You're in a phase in your growth where you don't have policies and procedures in place to keep up with the growth. Decisions are taking longer to make, and clients are less satisfied as you miss more deadlines due to the increase in business. You might find that employees have trouble as you implement policies and procedures when they are used to just doing things their own way.

Don't fret! This isn't necessarily the beginning of the end for you. Every company that is in "Predictable Success" (the point where every company should strive to be) has been in this stage before. Some businesses decide to cut back on their clientele and revert back to the fun phase where they can be more agile and spend more time on customer outcomes, but most push through to Predictable Success.

That push may result in some short-term difficulties, such as employee retention issues. Some employees will yearn for what the "old days" were like where they worked incredibly hard, but it was a lot of fun. With these new policies and procedures, it might seem like they are being micromanaged when the truth is that you just have to operate differently to grow and scale.

Some things that you will need to do to move from "Whitewater" to "Predictable Success" are:

• Design an Org Chart that helps with decision making.

• Managers must learn to relate to their peers rather than just their own hierarchy.

• Managers have to push the new alignment down rather than push back against these new norms.

• Creation of cross-functional teams must happen, and they must be given decision making authority. Start small here as too many cross-functional teams can be a deterrent to moving to "Predictable Success"

• These cross-functional teams should be empowered more and more as time goes on to assume authority and responsibility.

• Once all of these are accomplished, self-accountability and ownership will reemerge through your organization, and you are into "Predictable Success".

If these common problems sound like what stage your business is at, reach out to me for a free consultation to get you over the hump!