We mentioned in "Our Approach", the universal and root cause problems all businesses face at some time, especially those in a growth phase or post rapid growth and in steady decline. This cuts across sector, industry, age and size of business!
The usual litany of reasons cited for business failure are invariably not causes but symptoms!
Take any of these reasons provided by a recent CIPC commissioned research paper conducted by a credible university, and ask "why?" in an iterative fashion, like a 5 year old might do. Take "pressure from creditors" and ask the MD or CEO "why?":
I invite you to do the same on any of these reasons cited for failure. Do not make the mistake of confusing symptom and cause, which you will find almost always distill to the following:
But so what? How do we deal with these issues?
The need for the executive team to grow as leaders especially in their abilities to delegate and build effective teams.
| Problem Narrative | Symptoms and Failure Points | Addressed By |
|---|---|---|
| This applies to corporate, single business units, or successful start-ups. The role of the entrepreneur or the business management changes as businesses grow in headcount, especially in the critical transition phases when growing from 10 to 30 people, and most definitely when it reaching 50 people or more. Corporate entities and business units of large organizations can carry this problem as they have centralised functions, such as finance or marketing, but start-ups feel the pain immediately. Where once the management could be close to the business, and control everything, this becomes less and less the case. What makes a good entrepreneur or manager of any smaller enterprise can count against them. That attention to detail, the willingness to work hard, roll up their sleeves and lead by example, does not solve the problem and it now makes them the point of blockage. The solution must always lie in the business leadership being able to build teams in a structure that empowers the organisation. This ability to delegate outcomes to capable teams is key, without it time-lines slip, quality is eroded, people become frustrated with the business, etc | Broadly speaking this is a leadership failure, where we do not invest time in acknowledging, understanding and addressing our own part in mistakes made. This is why all Leadership begins with Personal Development. Presidents, War time Leaders, Civic leaders as well as business leaders neglect this. We all have some need for this. An inability to take longer time horizons on solving problems, to attack the heart of the problem, and to be able to attract talented people into a business who are empowered to deliver is a key leadership failure. | Personal Development
Module Leadership Module People & Org Module |
The need for systems and structures to handle the complexity that comes with growth and size.
| Problem Narrative | Symptoms and Failure Points | Addressed By |
|---|---|---|
| Instinct is highly under-rated, but as businesses grow, mistakes become harder to notice and thus make cheaply. Bad news also has a habit of getting over-looked, disguised and drowned out by good-news. "We have 15 new customers!" is not the same as "We have 15 new customers, but lost 5, and have lots of service complaints" Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts! Most growing businesses, run into a wall of bad data. The data problem leads naturally to process standardization. As you begin to ask the right questions, we naturally ask, "How long does this take?" "How come we have this complaint constantly?" Putting solutions in place re-enforces the need for some attention to process. | The right questions are either not being asked, or not being answered, this will be reflected in Strategy & Execution failures, where knowing your customer and why they use your business is a basic input and how we can measure business activity is key. It is also a failure in people where curiosity and talent always strive to gain more insights. The worst realization, is that your profitable business is becoming unprofitable as you grow, scale is being lost and inefficiencies are being allowed to embed themselves. | Strategy Module People & Org. Module Reliable Execution Module Habits & Behaviors Module |
The ability to navigate the increasingly tricky market dynamics as success marks arrival in a competitively aware marketplace.
| Problem Narrative | Symptoms and Failure Points | Addressed By |
|---|---|---|
| Where once you were small and flying beneath the radar, now you've popped up, get ready for unwelcome attention. Now it might just be worth forsaking 6 months of profits via aggressive marketing, predatory pricing, and poaching your talent to see you go under. Against the law, for sure, but by the time they have finished with you, you'll have no energy, no confidence and no money to do anything about it. You need to outwit and outperform the market and build some reserves to take the occasional knock. | If you haven't freed yourself and your leadership team to Lead the business instead of managing it, got the data to make good decisions, insight so you react before the rest of the market, then get ready for some pain. It is coming. You may as well just get acquired by a bigger competitor as soon as you can. Or let's preempt what will happen and avoid it or if we can't avoid it, make sure we win the fight or make the fight not worthwhile having! | Every Module's key development points integrated |
