The Problems You’ll See While Growing Your Business

When you are a small business with a team that can fit into one room, information flow is often simple and intuitive.

You – the business owner or manager – are usually at the heart of every decision, every action. However, when a business gets bigger this often changes.

As you grow from a small to medium-sized business, and eventually into a mid-market enterprise with substantial revenue and a team that numbers in the dozens, or even hundreds, the dynamic shifts. You find that being involved in every decision becomes not only impractical but a barrier to effective scaling.

Likewise, each member of your team can no longer have a comprehensive understanding, or play a role, in everything that’s happening in the business.

This pivotal moment necessitates a fundamental change in leadership mentality and skill. Further, across the business the structure of how work gets done, and improvements flow through the business, may need changing.

For instance, there is often a time where a layer of management needs to be transitioned into the business to allow it to effectively grow in profitable, strategic directions.

This means that some leaders reduce or eliminate their “doer” role. They no longer directly do the operational work, but instead ensure the work is done by others, to the requisite quality.

Letting go of doing work and being able to effectively delegate – trust and teach other people to produce great products and services – rarely comes naturally to people.

Now, it’s very important to recognise that this is a process which needs to evolve at an appropriate pace for the business. The creation of a dedicated management team needs to be carefully balanced with the financial capacity of the business.

Thrusting leaders and managers into unfamiliar roles without equipping them for success is a recipe for difficulty. As already stated, many are accustomed to being doers, and the shift to a role focused on delegation and, very importantly, finding the optimum balance between operational and strategic tasks can be challenging.

Awareness of these issues is the first step on the journey of scaling. Learning new skills, refining new roles, embedding scalable systems, crafting a consistent leadership approach, and moving away from tax-driven accounting are some of the other components of successful scaling.

Our webpage on Scaling a Business delves deeper into this transition, offering insights on how to navigate these changes effectively.

At the conclusion of the page, a spam-free Business Growth Diagnostic awaits. This tool provides a personalised assessment of your readiness to scale.

For help navigating the complexities of scaling a business with confidence and strategic business acumen, please look into booking a free Get To Know Each Other meeting over on the How We Get Started page.

Growing businesses will have growing numbers of leaders.

In many cases, these leaders are promoted from within the business. They are commonly promoted because of stellar performance. However, a potential flaw with this is that it is the leader’s technical skillset in getting work done that gets them promoted, whereas the skillset they need to perform as a leader is quite different. E.g. the ability to manage, delegate, mentor and inspire.

Some people learn leadership skills through the hard yards of experience, and some really struggle without appropriate education.

Whether your leaders are in, or out of, the boardroom a business seeking growth should be needing its leaders to become the best they can be. Without educating them, that’s a tough ask.

We don’t think leaving it up to leaders to learn to be the best leaders is something that should be left to chance.

Always keeping the financials in mind – i.e. cost and return on investment – leadership enhancement programmes should be incorporated into your business to enhance leadership.

The more targeted and relevant the programmes the better.

Your strategy and applicable 90-day strategic actions should greatly influence what leaders are taught. This is because enhancing your leaders’ skills with a regard to the present strategic actions is making the learning relevant and useful. It’s called Just-In-Time Learning.

Just-In-Time Learning is commonly designed to be cost effective by utilising a combination of group workshops and online learning. When designed and implemented well, your business develops stronger and stronger in-house capabilities, ideal for enhancing business growth.

Boardroom leadership may also be improved with similar learning, and also with the addition of coaching and/or regular participation in business leadership groups.

With these things in mind, we encourage you now to sign up to the Munro’s Business Academy. Also share the link with your leadership team. You and your leaders will gain access to some of the business leadership knowledge we have to share.

In due time, for more tailored learning and capability building for your team, we invite you to book a Get To Know Each Other meeting. We’d be delighted to run through with you what can be done and give you the opportunity to trial it completely Risk-Free.

See the How We Get Started page for more about our risk-free guarantee.

We’re again going to start a video with a tweet by Ayman Al-Abdullah, now business coach and former CEO of App Sumo – a business he grew from $3million to $80million:

If your company isn’t growing – you have 1 of 2 problems:

1. You don’t have enough leads

2. You have too many leads and can’t handle them all

Sales or Delivery.

Fix one

— Ayman Al-Abdullah 🧱 (@aymanalabdul) July 10, 2023

The fact is, a business could also have both problems, but regardless, they’re both common scaling barriers.

To traverse these scaling barriers, particularly being able to handle more business, your business needs to find a way to keep great talent, recruit great talent and enhance talent.

You’ll most likely need to make a conscious effort to do this.

Keeping great talent means providing clear career progression and upskilling, together with a high trust, high purpose culture.

By keeping great talent you already lower your recruitment issues. The benefit of keeping great talent with clear career progression, upskilling and an attractive culture is it also helps you recruit great talent.

Enhancing talent likewise fits well with the two afore-mentioned goals because one part is upskilling. The other part is having modern documented, but not burdensome, systems and procedures. Getting the working, productive know-how, of your business into documented systems and procedures is a pivotal step in enabling your business to scale. Both from an efficiency point of view but also key people dependency management.

Highlighting these points about what’s required to scale your business probably isn’t Earth shattering and nor do we proclaim it to be. Rather, it’s something we are obligated to address because albeit being fairly well accepted, it’s something commonly put to the side.

Building scalable systems, including winning the war for talent, means finding the time to step back, address root causes of issues and ultimately follow through with commitment and investment.

Don’t hear investment and think exorbitant cost.

1. because it’s not necessarily going to cost a huge sum of money, and
2. because you need to think of it as prudent cashflow expenditure spread over a time horizon that generates medium to long term return on investment.

Also think about the freed-up time and reduced stress of having a highly capable future business team.

We can work with any business across Australia looking to build and improve their systems to scale from the low millions to tens of millions in revenue. All beginning from a free Get To Know Each Other meeting and risk-free trial of our services. See the How We Get Started page to begin the journey.