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How To Break The Profitable Growth Ceiling
How to Increase Momentum to Grow How to Strengthen Your Competitive Strategy How to Build an A-Player Leadership Team How to Get Your Team Executing Efficiently How To Find Time To Work On The Business How to Change Your Mindset to Grow and Thrive Why a DIY Approach Slows Growth The 8 Options for Outside Support Why Leadership Training Doesn’t Work Do You Have What It Takes? The 5 Criteria to Pick an Executive Team Coach  While profit is obviously critical to any business, it is often simplistically depicted as the result of maximizing revenues and minimizing expenses.
However, companies often wrestle with the challenge of determining what expenses are critical to making their revenues, and which ones can be spared without affecting the top line. One book on profitability demystifies profit creation. The Art of Profitability, by Adrian Slywotzky, demonstrates that profitability is achieved through the appropriate choice of business strategy, or business model, if you prefer. Through the engaging parable of a strategy veteran coaching an aspiring strategy professional, Slywotzky covers 23 common and not-so-common “profit models.” The Customer Solution Profit model, for example, is when a company invests significant up front time and energy to learn about a customer to develop tailored solutions just for them. These then generate ongoing profits for a long time after. Multi-Component Profit is where the same product is sold to the same customers through different channels at different prices to maximize profitability (eg. Coke). The key message is that profit creation is an experimental art rather than a certain science. But it can be learned and practiced. The story also vividly illustrates effective coaching of strategic thinking, or of any other skill. Book: 272 pages, full audio - 5 hours 36 minutes. Soundview Summary: 4 pages, 16 minute audio. How can you improve your profitability? To find out how to improve your profitability to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 5 to check your profitability management practices. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Supporting, Developing and Retaining High Performers In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are delighted to offer you a $50 USD discount to Increase Your Influence, Leadership and Impact at Work, with Liz Wiseman. Every leader is navigating the effects of the global pandemic and learning what it takes to be adaptive and resilient to change when change is the only guarantee of the future. In a competitive market, the demand for Impact Players – those standout contributors who create extraordinary value everywhere they work – is higher than ever. In this 2.5 hour live virtual event, Liz Wiseman, bestselling author of Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter and Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger and Multiply Your Impact combines her brightest work to help leaders win the war on talent, build sustainable, high-performing teams and drive lasting results. “We don’t tend to drift into better behaviour.” – Liz Wiseman Impact Players are agile, easy to work with and get the job done even in times of uncertainty, like the one we’re in now. Once you’ve identified an Impact Player, how do you amplify their impact and keep them in your business? Leaders need to manage in a way that’s worthy of an Impact Player, providing the reward and recognition they deserve. Monday, October 17, 2022 - 5pm in MB, 4pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $295* | OUR NETWORK: $245*  *Prices quoted in USD. How can you develop high performers?
To find out how to develop your talent to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete sections 2 to check your company’s talent processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Simon Sinek has popularized the scientifically proven idea that a company’s purpose, and how much the leaders promote, act and live by that purpose, is one of many key ingredients for building a great culture and workplace. Yet many midsize company owners and CEOs find it difficult to bring their company’s purpose to life and help employees connect to that purpose. In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches webinar, Petr Ludwig, author of The End of Procrastination and founder of Procrastination.com and the GrowJob Institute, based in New York, Prague and Dubai, shares how CEOs need to be leaders of the purpose movement in their own lives to inspire others to find their purpose at work. Subscribe to Gravitas Impact podcast: Android
How can you strengthen your leadership? To find out how to become a better leader to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 1 and 2 to check your leadership and people processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  There are many challenges to growing a thriving mid-size company. (as I’ve shared in this 5 Minute Growth Tip article series). And sometimes it can feel like we’re stuck, like there's nothing we can do.
We may hide those thoughts and feelings from others, or even deny to ourselves that we have them. Yet, they still remain in the background of our thinking, gnawing away at our focus, energy and progress. This is an opportunity to check our thinking. Our thinking drives our actions. And our thinking can cause us to not take action. When we think there’s nothing we can do about a problem, we’ll naturally stand still on that issue. When we believe we can resolve it, we’ll find a solution and drive forward. Organizational psychologists have researched these two ways of thinking. They are part of what’s called our “locus of control”. The first way of thinking is that our situation is controlled by things that happen outside of us. We believe we are a victim of circumstances. This is an external locus of control. The second way of thinking is that our situation can be influenced by what we do. We believe we can always do something that will make a situation better. This is an internal locus of control. Think of the word “locus” as “location”. Is our thinking putting the “location” of control of the situation outside of ourselves (external) or within ourselves (internal)? As human beings, we tend to grow up with a tendency toward either an internal locus of control or an external one. We don’t think exclusively one way or the other, but rather predominantly. That said, we don’t necessarily think one way about everything. There can be areas of our lives and facets of our business that we treat with an internal locus of control mindset, and other areas that we tend to treat with an external locus of control. As entrepreneurs and business leaders, we often predominantly have an internal locus of control: we believe we can make things happen. However, we can also have an external locus of control in certain areas. For example, we might have an internal locus of control about getting more sales. We know that our actions directly influence our company’s sales volumes, and we look for and find ways to increase them. Yet, we might have an external locus of control about being able to hire A players. We may believe that there just aren’t any really strong employees out there, or none of them are looking for work, or they all want too much money, or they all hide their faults in interviews, etc. By switching our thinking to an internal locus of control in this area, we can find solutions. We can ask ourselves, “what is it that I’m doing that is getting in the way of hiring A players?” Or “what am I not doing, or not doing well?” And from there, we can ask “what can I do differently to find A players?” For example, do I have a clear description of what an A player will produce so I know exactly who I am looking for? What am I doing to network with A players I know in my industry who likely know other A players? Have I shopped around for an excellent recruiting company who can help me find the right people? Have I strengthened my interviewing skills to discover candidates’ true strengths, abilities and qualities? Have we captured on paper the advantages of working at our company, and do we sell great candidates on those virtues? Believing we have influence over the situation causes us to look for solutions we can act on. There’s also a way that an entrepreneur’s strong internal locus of control can actually create an external locus of control mindset in another area. I often see this struggle with CEOs and owners I meet. They complain that they don’t have enough time. This complaint is coming from an external locus of control mindset: the belief that their lack of time is happening to them. (Note that all complaining and blaming is really a form of external locus of control). When I invite a CEO or owner to flip their mindset to an internal locus of control, and ask themself what they are doing that is causing them to not have enough time, they realize that they are causing the problem. They often are attempting to jump on every problem and opportunity that comes up, and they are not delegating tasks and roles enough. In this way, as entrepreneurs, our internal locus of control about solving problems can cause us to have an external locus of control about time. Our tendency to think we can take control of any situation actually causes us to be so busy that we think we don’t have control of our time. Yet we do. We just need to change how we tackle problems, for example, by equipping others to take care of them rather than solving them ourselves. This mindset is a key linchpin in growing a thriving mid-sized company. The only way to grow and grow profitably, is to implement the structures, systems and processes to enable that growth. This then requires a leadership team that handles the day-to-day and can help with implementing many of those systems. These systems need to be guided by a solid strategy for competing in the market. That strategy needs to be executed efficiently. And efficient execution requires an A player leadership team, as well as efficient buy-in to support accountability. And all of these business practices take time. As a result, a CEO or owner will want to shift their mindset more fully to thinking about what they are doing, or not doing, that is causing them to be too busy to do these essential things. By doing so, they will get clear on what they need to do differently to free themselves up to shift increasingly from doing to leading. And, more generally, the practice of internal locus of control will help any leader, and their top team, look at how they’re contributing to a problem, and what they can do to influence it. Another way leaders contribute to problems in their company is by trying to figure things out all on their own. We’ll tackle that topic in my next 5 Minute Growth Tip article. What can you do to grow your mid-size company? To find out what you and your leadership team could do to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Best practices for being competitive and impactful in a post-pandemic world In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are delighted to offer you a 10% discount to Competing In The New World of Work, a 1.5-hour live and interactive virtual event with Keith Ferrazzi. The pandemic forced leaders to shed outdated ways of doing business and make bold leaps into the future of work. In this live, virtual masterclass, New York Times bestselling author Keith Ferrazzi shares the emerging best practices of thousands of c-suite executives and teaches how to remain competitive and impactful in a post-pandemic world. Keith will offer a bold new vision for what the organisation of the future looks like —digital, distributed, inclusive, resilient, empathic— and the emerging best leadership practices that will redefine success in the ever-evolving world of work. “Success in any field, but especially in business is about working with people, not against them.” – Keith Ferrazzi You’ll leave inspired, ready to catapult your organisation forward, embrace new realities and discover new frontiers Based on an ambitious global research initiative involving thousands of executives, innovators, and change-makers who have redefined their strategies, business models, organisational systems, and even their cultures, this masterclass offers leaders the inspiration and the road map to:
Tuesday, September 13, 2022 - 8pm in MB, 7pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $130* | OUR NETWORK: $115* *Prices quoted in USD. How can you adapt your leadership?
To find out how to adapt your leadership to the post-pandemic world to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete sections 1 and 2 to check your company’s leadership and people processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  In our webinar earlier this year with Greg Crabtree, speaker, entrepreneur, financial expert and author of Simple Numbers 2.0, he shared what returns entrepreneurs should expect from their business: 5% net profit is survival, 10% is a good business, and 15% is a great business. These numbers are true for about 70% of businesses. He and his firm have since discovered a financial metric and standard that works for any company, regardless of industry, and that helps CEOs find surefire ways to improve their return on investment. In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches podcast, Crabtree shares this better metric, the additional levers to improve your return and how, contrary to a lot of financial advice, a business owner’s best investment decision is often not to diversify into other businesses, but rather to reinvest in their current business. Greg also shares how his background growing up on a chicken farm to becoming an accountant has led to how strongly he feels about helping entrepreneurs create security for their families. Subscribe to Gravitas Impact podcast: Android
How can you improve your company’s return on investment? To find out how to increase your return to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 5 to check your profit processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  In my experience, one of the most overlooked disciplines in business is pricing. This is also reflected in the small number of books on the topic, compared to those on leadership, marketing, strategy, etc.
How often do you and your leadership team ask: Could our prices be increased? Are we discounting too much? How can we protect our pricing as competitors enter? How can we price to capture other segments of the market? This topic is all the more relevant in the current environment of high inflation. It’s critical right now for many companies to figure out how much they can pass on supplier price increases to their customers without losing them or drastically reducing volumes. These questions, and others, are covered in depth in Pricing With Confidence by Reed Holden and Mark Burton. As pricing consultants to large firms, they are well versed in the internal organizational dynamics that make pricing challenging. A key theme in their book is “build your selling backbone”. This requires thoroughly understanding the value of your product or service relative to alternatives in the market. That means analysing the added (or lesser) financial value of your offering based on the results it delivers or enables for your customers. The authors also share insights on how to shift pricing at different stages of a product’s life. Although clunky to read, and technical at times, this book is well worth the time investment. Book: 202 pages, full audio - 7 hours 23 minutes. How can you improve your pricing and profitability? To find out how to improve your profitability to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 5 to check your profitability management practices. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Over the last five 5 Minute Growth Tip articles, I’ve described the critical leadership team best practices to implement the structures, systems and processes to enable profitable growth.
However, you might be thinking, “I can see how it all works, but I’m really busy! I don’t have time for these things. I don’t even have time for family, friends or even myself.” But might there be a way to make time? How might you successfully do less of what you’re doing right now so you have the time to put these best practices in place, to enable the profitable growth you want to see, and lead the life you want to live? How can you get out of the weeds? The simple solutions One could maybe end this article right here with the trite saying “delegate and elevate”. This simple tactic may do the job for you. Start by listing out all the things you do on a week to week or month to month basis. Take a hard look at everything that could be handed off to others. You may find there are a number of quick wins that will create time in your calendar to put some serious effort into your leadership team and the company. Sit down with each person you’ll delegate to. Be clear on your expectations and standards. Show them how you want things done, praise their progress and good work. Redirect them if they slip backwards. But sometimes handing things off to others doesn’t seem feasible. Your team may be really busy too. Maybe they feel tapped out. Another option is to hire another leader to take over some of your accountabilities. For example, you may still be leading sales, marketing, operations, R&D or administration. What would it be like to have someone else doing a great job fully leading one or more of those areas for you? Identify what you want to delegate, hire another leader with a great track record in those areas and get on with making the changes and improvements to the business to get your return on that investment. This solution assumes your company is in a financial position to invest in making that hire. But sometimes, that might not be feasible. The last simpler option is to find quick ways to improve profitability so you can afford to invest in another leader who will take on some of your accountabilities. The good news is that this can often be done with some small tweaks to the business. A one percent increase in pricing to customers, a one percent decrease in cost of goods sold and a one percent decrease in overhead costs can make a big difference to the bottom line: anywhere from 10 to 80% depending on your business model and cost structure. That can often be enough to invest in another leader. If these kinds of profit enhancing quick wins aren’t feasible in your company, you may feel stuck, like you’re in a chicken or egg position: you need to delegate to make more significant changes to improve profitability and invest in growth, but you need more profit to invest in leaders so you can delegate. The alternative solution Simple delegation, hiring another leader or quickly increasing profits to do so aren’t always an option. Sometimes the only other way is to get more done with the people we have. This means increasing your leadership team’s efficiency so your team members have the capacity to take on some of your roles and/or lead some internal change projects on your behalf. How do you do that? By getting the right people in the right seats, improving their execution and strengthening leadership team buy-in and accountability. Right people in the right seats This starts with defining the right functions on the leadership team and making adjustments to ensure you have the right person leading each function. Over time, if not early on, other leaders will be able take on functions you’re currently leading. The goal is to make sure each leader is highly productive leading their function(s) and driving high productivity in their respective teams. We also want them to behave in constructive ways (aligned with your core values) that minimize drama across the leadership team and within each of their departments. Leaders can become even more efficient by ensuring they have the right people in the right seats within their departments and that their people are also behaving constructively. See this article for more on getting the right people in the right seats. Efficient execution Having the right people in the right seats on your team provides a good foundation. But how much of their potential productivity you tap into will depend on how each leader and the team executes. Through improved execution practices, your leadership team members will deliver better results, need less attention from you, have capacity to take on one or more of your functions and lead improvement projects you might otherwise lead. Great execution involves: 1) each leader owning clear metrics and targets for the company and their respective functions for the year and the quarter, 2) each leader driving 2 to 3 clear priorities for change and improvement for the next year and quarter, with a 13 week sprint plan to make each one happen, and 3) a rhythm of efficient weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings to hold each other accountable to hit the numbers, move the priorities forward and set new priorities for the next quarter. Daily huddles also help speed things up by identifying obstacles to solve as soon as they come up. A note about choosing those few critical priorities: getting the right people in the right seats needs to be a top priority for the first quarter if you want to delegate and elevate yourself, and then have your leaders do the same. You will then be rewarded every quarter with a bit more capacity so you can work more on other priorities to move the company forward. See this article for more on efficient execution. Leadership team buy-in and accountability For any of this to work, the leadership team needs to be bought in and committed. The best way is to do this WITH your team, not TOO your team. Discuss and decide on leadership team functions and assignments, set metrics and targets, and decide on company priorities WITH your leadership team. This way, they’ll be bought into these changes and driven to make them happen. These practices will improve accountability and drive efficiency. You can strengthen accountability further by 1) leading by example in all these activities, 2) raising your expectations of your leaders, and 3) communicating in ways that maintain their natural motivation to execute. See this article for more on leadership team buy-in and accountability. Making it happen Getting the right people in the right seats, improving execution and getting leadership team buy-in and accountability will increase your team’s efficiency and enable you to delegate some of your functions and internal projects, so you can get out of the weeds. As you gain momentum, you’ll carve out more time for yourself and your team to work on strategy, implement other structures, systems, processes, and build capacity to grow and grow profitably. Ultimately, you’ll also start to be able to make more time for your family, rekindle old friendships and get back to some of the personal things you enjoy. You probably won’t delegate and elevate in one fell swoop. But bite off what you can and you’ll create capacity to bite off more as you go. For example, you might find that more than one leader needs to be replaced. Start with one in the first quarter. Replacing even just one unfit leader with an excellent one will help reduce your workload. This will give you some breathing room to make other changes. The same will hold true for the employee changes your leaders make in their departments. That said, at the foundation of all this is having a rhythm of efficient meetings to make decisions as a team, plan, execute and hold each other accountable. And that takes a commitment of time up front. Now you may be wondering, “I said I was too busy to implement the best practices for profitable growth, and now Jean-Guy is suggesting solving my busy-ness by implementing some of those same best practices…I said I’m too busy!” Here’s the thing… it’s like exercising. We can say, “I can’t run because I don’t have the stamina.” But the only way to build up the stamina is to start running. Not alot to start - maybe 500 meters. But start. After a few runs, you’ll be able to run more - maybe a kilometer. In not too long, you’ll have the stamina to run 5 kilometers, and then 10. It’s an investment that pays off. The nice thing is that it pays off as you go. You don’t have to wait until some magical point in the future. But the only way to start getting the payoff is to start. And sometimes that takes a shift in mindset. More on that in my next 5 Minute Growth Tip article. How can you strengthen delegation in your entrepreneurial company? To find out how to improve delegation in your business to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete sections 1, 2 and 4 to check your delegation practices. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Many CEOs struggle with mastering their own productivity as they encourage a culture of accountability in their organization. They feel constantly busy, overwhelmed and inundated. In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches webinar, Hao Lam, author, coach and CEO of the Best in Class Education Center in Seattle, Washington, shares his own schedule to demonstrate the habits and tools he’s used to monitor and improve his time management skills in both his personal and professional life. Lam also shares his personal story of escaping Vietnam as a refugee, and finding his passion for providing education worldwide, as outlined in his book From Bad to Worse to Best in Class. Subscribe to Gravitas Impact podcast: Android
How can you and your team become more productive? To find out how to improve your productivity to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 4 to check your execution practices. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  The 4 Disciplines of Execution, first published in 2004 by Stephen R. Covey, was revised and rereleased in 2012 by his son Sean Covey and colleagues Chris McChesney and Jim Huling. It covers a comprehensive system for executing change across a company.
The 4DX system is organized around four principles: 1) Focus on a small number of wildly important goals (WIGs). The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish. So narrow your focus and make tough choices. 2) Act on lead measures contributing to those goals. The WIGs still need to be measured. But measuring the actions to achieve the WIGs will support accountability for what’s truly actionable. 3) Keep a compelling scorecard. It must be so simple that team members can track their own score and they determine instantly if they are winning or losing. 4) Create a weekly cadence of accountability to contribute to moving the score. Unless we consistently hold each other accountable, the goal naturally fizzles in the whirlwind of the day-to-day. 4DX is a detailed and highly specified system refined by the FranklinCovey organization over the last decade and a half. I’m usually wary of any book that claims its system will work well every time. However, I can say that 4DX does work for executive teams (alot of the time - more on that below). It’s very similar to the approach from Scaling Up and the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth that we use with leadership teams to help them execute their strategies. And that works. That said, how well these execution disciplines work depends on a number of things, such as:
While 4DX is a proven execution method, the results will be limited if these other more foundational aspects of the business aren’t also worked on. This is the benefit of a holistic,integrated approach to business growth like Scaling Up or the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth. They go beyond symptoms to address the root causes of top team challenges, stymied company growth and CEO frustration. Book: 352 pages, full audio - 8 hours 30 minutes, abridged audio – 3 hours 40 minutes. Summary on Soundview: 8 pages, 22 minute audio. On GetAbstract: 5 pages, 10 minute audio. How can you improve your team’s execution? To find out how to improve your execution to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 4 to check your execution practices. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are delighted to offer you a $50 discount to a Good to Great Event: How to Develop Level 5 Leaders, a 2.5-hour live and interactive virtual event with Jim Collins. Take a deep dive into two key concepts from Jim Collins #1 New York Times bestseller; Good to Great – Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t - Level 5 Leadership and First Who, Then What. According to the globally renowned teacher and thought-leader, Jim Collins, Level 5 Leaders display a powerful mixture of personal humility and indomitable will. They're incredibly ambitious, but their ambition is first and foremost for the cause, for the organisation and its purpose, not themselves. “People are not your most important asset. The right people are.” – Jim Collins Those who build great organisations make sure they have the right people on the bus and the right people in the key seats before they figure out where to drive the bus. They always think about first who and then what. When facing chaos and uncertainty, when you cannot possibly predict what's coming around the corner, your best "strategy" is to have a busload of people who can adapt and perform brilliantly no matter what comes next. Overcoming the war on talent is one of the biggest post-pandemic challenges for leaders and managers. The best candidates are hard to find, hard to lock in and even harder to keep. Companies winning the war on talent understand how the workforce has evolved, communicate an inspiring vision for the future and are led by teams who care not just about their people, but the communities they serve and their impact on the planet. Wednesday, August 17, 2022 - 6pm in MB, 5pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $295* | OUR NETWORK: $245* *Prices quoted in USD. How can you develop your leaders?
To find out how to develop your leaders to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete sections 1 and 2 to check your company’s leadership and people processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  In a previous 5 Minute Growth Tip article, I discussed how strategy is not a lengthy action plan but the evolution of a central idea about how a company can be unique and valuable to its customers.
So if a strategy is about how the company needs to compete, then how does a CEO and their A player leadership team make it happen? With a best practice execution plan and process. The Execution Challenge In my experience over the last 17 years working with leadership teams, when CEOs and owners of mid-size companies decide to do formal planning with their leadership team, they often go through a traditional strategic planning process. However, this often falls short of what they need to execute on their plan. Many strategic plans include a mission or purpose, vision and values. These are all important. Yet there is often little about how the company will compete in the market or how the plan will be executed. Often, these documents have vague plans for implementing whatever rough direction they’ve set out: some high level multi-year focus areas, or maybe some one year initiatives. In the best case, an annual budget is built with or without the strategic plan in mind. From there, the leadership team members may review the company’s numbers quarterly, or maybe monthly. Although often, this doesn’t happen either. In the meantime, the CEO assumes the leaders are working on making improvements and changes in their departments that align with the high level priorities set out in the plan. After a couple of quarters, a few things can happen:
Does this pattern sound familiar? Does it cause drama, tension and low morale? Usually so. Is it efficient? Not really. Does this hamper progress, growth and profitability? For sure it does. And is it any fun? No. So, what’s the solution? Not a traditional strategic plan. But a strategy (which I outlined here) and an execution plan and process. Our 3 key disciplines of low drama execution describe how it works: 1) Metrics and Targets, 2) Priorities and 3) an effective Meeting Rhythm. Metrics and Targets Watching the numbers may seem like the most obvious of the three disciplines. We all know that tracking financial results is an important part of monitoring whether we’re on track. However, there are other key numbers to monitor as well. While some metrics, like financial numbers, tell us how we’ve done, others give us an indication of how we’re going to do. This is the difference between lagging metrics and leading metrics. For a company as a whole, lagging metrics will be things like financial results, units delivered and market share. Some leading company metrics may be customer loyalty, on-time delivery, employee engagement or the percentage of employees that are A players. There are also different timeframes to set targets for with those metrics. We want to set mid-term targets for our key company metrics, say for 3 years out. These targets should align with our 10 to 30 year vision, or Big Hairy Audacious Goal, as well as our best-guess estimates of what’s possible with the core customer and sandbox we chose in our strategy. From there, we can set goals for those same metrics for the next year. For most of those metrics, we’ll also set goals for the first quarter. And finally, for many metrics, often leading metrics, we might be able to set monthly or even weekly milestones. Setting short-term goals that align with mid-term targets that align with a longer term vision allows the leadership team to commit to biting off a certain amount of progress each quarter. This way, we can check that we’re making enough progress over the weeks, months and quarters to achieve what we need to for the year, which will contribute to reaching our 3 year targets and our 10 year vision. The evolution of this is to work with each leadership team member to identify one or two metrics for each of the functions they lead, as well as goals for those metrics for the year and each quarter. Priorities Metrics measure the results and state of our day to day operations, and how they’re progressing towards our vision. Priorities, on the other hand, are the changes and improvements to those operations. These are what we want and need to implement to make it possible to achieve those mid to long term goals and targets. Going back to my first article in this series on how companies need to do things differently to continue to grow and profitably, these priorities represent, in part, those very structures, systems and processes. Priorities may also be about building or buying new facilities, equipment, or other significant capital assets, to expand or replace capacity. Priorities should also build the capabilities needed to bring to life or strengthen the unique differentiation we chose in our strategy. Like with metrics, we chunk these down from long term to mid term to short term. This again helps us make progress every quarter which supports the progress we want to make over time. We can start with planning out what’s needed over three years. These are all the changes and improvements that need to happen to achieve our 3 year targets. For example, “Developing our middle managers” or “Upgrading our manufacturing plant”. From our 3 year plan, we’ll choose our priorities for year 1 (we also call these Initiatives). They capture the handful of large multi-quarter change projects to bite off an important chunk of our 3 year plan. And from our 1 year priorities, we’ll choose quarterly priorities (we also call these Rocks). These are the multi-month change projects that will help us complete one or more of our annual priorities. The evolution here is for each leader to work with their own team to identify and choose the priorities they need to work on to change and improve their own departments. An Effective Meeting Rhythm It’s great to know what targets need to be achieved and what priorities have to be accomplished over the next quarter to make progress towards our mid-term and long-term goals. But we know that unforeseen things will happen during the quarter. Problems will come up. Things can get forgotten. People can lose focus. So, how do we make sure our leadership team executes on our quarterly plan in the midst of all that? Through regular communication. An effective and efficient meeting rhythm is the key. This meeting rhythm includes:
The purpose of weekly leadership team meetings are to check if our metrics and priorities are on track, take corrective action to keep them on track, and solve problems in the day to day operations or with the priorities. Daily leadership team huddles are to keep all team members in sync throughout the week and identify problems quickly so they can be resolved as they come up. Monthly leadership team meetings are to check that our metrics, priorities AND monthly financial results are on track, take corrective action, adjust the plan as needed and tackle larger tactical or strategic issues. Quarterly planning meetings are to check what we accomplished over the last quarter, adjust course for the year and set our goals and priorities for the next 90 days. The annual planning meeting is to assess overall progress, note market trends, adjust our strategy, long term vision and 3 year targets and priorities, and decide what we’ll bite off with our goals and priorities for the coming year and first quarter. With a clear purpose and a proven agenda for each type of meeting, and with the right people running the meetings and keeping things on track, these meetings can keep the leadership team and its members focused and executing efficiently throughout the year. Pulling it all together A clear, aligned execution plan and an effective execution process will minimize drama and maximize efficiency and goal achievement. However, this will work best if we create the execution plan with the leadership team, so there is efficient leadership team buy-in. And this goes for the strategy as well. Combine all this with strong accountability practices and having A players on our leadership team, and we have a powerful mixture to reliably implement the structures, systems and processes to implement our strategy, build capacity, and grow consistently and profitably...AND enjoy the ride. That said, this all may seem daunting if you and your leadership team are too busy working in the weeds. If that’s you - and most CEOs I meet have this challenge - read my next 5 Minute Growth Tip article on how to shift from working mostly “in the business” to working more “on the business”, and having more time for you and your family as well. How can your team execute with less drama? To find out how to speed up execution to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 4 to check your execution processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  What might have happened for so many companies around the world if they had been prepared, prior to the pandemic, to successfully face the inevitable: that some unforeseeable shift in the world would become a sudden and significant threat or opportunity for their business? In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches webinar, Patrick Ginn, Founder and CEO of the Ginn Group in Vancouver, Washington, shares his experience building a resilient, aligned and agile company that was able to more easily and successfully navigate the pandemic. “Nothing could prepare us,” Ginn shared, “But we had already identified through coaching and in our quarterly and annual planning process that at some point, given our industry, a change would happen.” Ginn worked with a business coach to create a versatile business model and share it with employees to foster a mindset of alignment throughout the company, enabling them to move quickly in response to change. Listen to hear how the culture of “embracing change” became a Core Value for Ginn Group and for Patrick himself! Listen to part 2 to hear how Ginn is using his business to connect to the community through Ginn Gives. Subscribe to Gravitas Impact podcast: Android
How can you build an agile company? To find out how to align your team and foster agility to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are delighted to offer you a 10% discount to Create Independent, Empowered Employees with Mark Green. To create sustainable scale you must grow, challenge and engage your team by increasing autonomy, mastery and purpose. These easy-to-list, challenging-to-achieve attributes eliminate countless leadership headaches and benefit organisations in multiple ways. They’re also required if your aspirations include elevating your leadership to scale your firm. In this live virtual masterclass, Mark Green will unpack the five leadership behaviors that create autonomy, mastery and purpose. Learn them, internalize them and create an independent and empowered team. Join Business and Leadership Growth Coach Mark Green to tap into more than 20 years of success helping start-ups, as well as small and mid-market firms, beat the odds and scale to significance. Tuesday, August 2, 2022 - 8pm in MB, 7pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $130* | OUR NETWORK: $115* *Prices quoted in USD. How can you empower your people?
To find out how to empower your employees to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete sections 1 and 2 to check your company’s leadership and people processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Little did I know I was embarking on a tricky mental adventure when I started reading The Goal, by the late Eli Goldratt. I was glad to find out the book was written as a business fable, which made it easier to understand than a technical style.
The Goal walks us through the journey of a manager who is told he has only three months to turn his plant around, all while his marriage is on the brink, in part, due to overwork. The manager figures out, with his team, what the ultimate goal of his plant is, how to make that goal relevant to their people and how to optimize the plant to achieve the goal. The story walks the reader through a mind shift from seeing a plant as a collection of parts to be individually optimized, towards seeing it as a whole system that requires careful coordination of the parts. Based on the same underlying principles as Lean manufacturing, the approach addresses the root causes of inefficiency by identifying and resolving bottle-necks between these different parts of the plant to improve the productivity of the whole. The manager also applies this approach to a company-wide scenario to determine the most important things to improve. This is the same way we have our clients prioritize changes and improvements in their business. The story also weaves in other useful best practices, such as tackling company-wide issues as a united management team and using outside expertise, lessons learned discussions, transparency and vulnerability. Book: 408 pages; 11 hour 45 minute audio book. How can you improve your efficiency? To find out how to improve your systems and processes to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 7 to check your company’s systems and processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  When it comes to reaching new customers, most companies miss the mark by overcomplicating their messaging, making it either too generic or overly technical. And it’s a costly mistake. In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches podcast, David Mann, keynote speaker, trainer, professional actor/director/storyteller and founder of the Simple Message, describes how to tell the right story, communicate value and engage your ideal customer’s emotions. Too often, businesses lose opportunities and profits by leading with their product or service, who they are or what’s unique about them. Focusing instead on simple messaging that speaks to solving the customer's problem, and executing that message across marketing channels that engage your ideal customers, leads to increased brand engagement, trust and loyalty. And above all it will differentiate your brand in a way that truly resonates. Subscribe to Gravitas Impact podcast: Android
How can you resonate with your ideal customer? To find out how to connect with your best type of customer to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 6 to check your company’s customer processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  In the previous 5 Minute Growth Tip article, I shared some tips for developing a successful strategy to compete and thrive in your market. Yet, developing a great strategy (and executing it) takes more than a framework. It takes a high performing leadership team. That, in turn, takes high performing leaders.
The People Challenge As a CEO, president, owner or entrepreneur, you’ve likely had department heads on your team that didn’t meet your expectations or were poor leaders. It can be frustrating to be repeatedly disappointed or to have to continuously push, cajole or just grin and bear it. Yet, it’s entirely feasible to resolve these headaches and prevent them from happening in the first place. This is about ensuring that, on the leadership team, we have the right people in the right seats doing the right things in the right ways. The key to getting it right is not to start by looking at the people. The first thing to do is define the right seats, right things and right ways, and then ensure we have the right people that fit what we need. Right Seats First, we want to ensure we have the right seats - the right roles needed on our leadership team. These usually include some common functional roles like marketing, sales, operations, accounting, finance, human resources, technology & systems, etc. Keep in mind that, often, leadership team members in mid-size companies need to play more than one role. Certain functions don’t need a full time leader just yet. By thinking of it this way, we can identify what functional roles are being played by each leader, and whether the right roles exist on the team. It may be that certain roles don’t exist that need to, or a role has been left unfilled. It’s also helpful to identify any roles that seem to have more than one person playing them, causing mixed messages and confusion. It may also be that certain leaders are in too many roles, therefore being stretched thin and dropping balls. Having the right seats means having clarity about what roles are needed and where there are gaps and overlaps. Right Things We also want to get each leader, and the whole leadership team, on the same page about what each role means and what is expected in terms of results (eg. role: marketing => results: qualified leads). It’s best if these results expectations are quantified with metrics and specific targets (eg. 50 qualified leads per month). The results, metrics and targets are the productivity side of each role. The “right things” will often also include the big changes and improvements that need to be made within each function over the course of the year and/or the quarter. Right Ways We also want to be clear about the behavioural side. This includes defining the behavioural expectations needed across the leadership team and across the company. These behaviours are captured in our core values. These core values distill the essential behaviours expected of everyone in the company, including the leadership team members. This is what enables great teamwork, productive conversations and problem-solving, developing a strong strategy and execution plan, and coordinating to execute. Clarity on core values is also critical because leaders living them is one of the main ways the company’s culture is brought to life among employees. Right People With productivity and behaviour expectations clear, we want to ensure we have the right person in each seat. We can ask ourselves: is each person on the leadership team meeting our expectations...in terms of both the results expected in their role AND the behaviours captured in our core values? Furthermore, if we want to build a thriving company, we’ll need A-players. We define A-players as being among the top 10% performers for the specific role and for the pay we can afford, AND they live and breathe all of our core values. Being a top 10% leader doesn’t just mean doing a great job at one’s function: marketing, accounting or human resources, etc. It means getting great productivity from their people - both quantity and quality of work. This takes strong planning, communication, delegation, monitoring and coaching skills. Often leaders tend towards one of two extremes: micro-managing or laisser-faire management. Strong leaders will stay involved enough to monitor and be supportive while at the same time letting experienced employees use their skills, be self-sufficient and take initiative. A-player leaders create an environment in their department that inspires employees to perform at their best. The Challenge of Behaviour Change When it comes to leaders who don’t live our core values, it’s often a dead end. Because a person’s values can’t really be changed. People behave according to what they believe. If they grew up believing that learning and adapting is valuable in its own right, they’ll learn and adapt on the job. If they believe that tradition, duty and compliance are noble, they won’t behave in adaptable ways. If they don’t believe in one of our core values, there’s often not much we can do about it. We can coach them on that core value, and they may start behaving more in alignment with it for a while. And if so, great. It’s worth giving it a try. But often, they’ll slip back into their habits. This means that often, a leader that isn’t living one or more of our core values never truly will. And so they’ll never be an A player leader, at least not in our company. Addressing the Gaps As CEOs, presidents and owners, we can often be hesitant to let a leader go who doesn’t fit. Our underlying concern is often that maybe we weren’t clear on our expectations or maybe we didn’t coach the leader enough or very effectively. So, it can be reassuring to start by establishing clear expectations and providing better coaching where needed. At the end of the day, the leader may still not meet our expectations. But at least we’ll know that we did what we could to support them. A good practice is to, every quarter, ask ourselves how each of the members of our leadership team are performing both in terms of results AND core values. Then, for any team members that aren’t performing, ask, what will I do about it this quarter? Will I coach them or cut the chord? If we keep coaching the leader on the same issue quarter after quarter, we should not only question their leadership, we should question ours too. A Caution Sometimes a leader’s poor performance IS in fact our fault. It’s entirely possible for a CEO to create an environment where people can’t perform well. Maybe we’re the micro-manager, or the laisser-faire manager. Or we set a poor example by not being accountable or not living some of our core values. If we have just one or two leaders whose performance is in question and the majority of the leaders reporting to us are performing great, we may have a people issue. Yet, if most or all of our leaders are struggling, chances are our own leadership is what needs work. Working Through Hesitation Usually, the decision to let a leader go isn’t hard. Once we think it through, it’s often pretty clear. It’s just that we avoid thinking it through. We avoid it because of how it feels. It’s sad. It’s disappointing. It’s nerve-racking. We can feel guilty or like a failure. If we acknowledge, accept and process those feelings, we can then face the facts of the situation and come to a logical, firm conclusion. This can usually be tackled with some pros and cons thinking, considering all the impacts of the leader, on both the culture and performance of their department, the leadership team and the company as a whole. Replacing a Leader It’s one thing to come to realize and accept that a leader has to go. It’s another to feel confident we can successfully replace them with an A-player. If you’re concerned about this, you probably have a recruiting and selection problem. And you’re not alone. The average hiring process picks an A-player 25% of the time. Implement the Top Grading or A-Method hiring process and you’ll notch that up to an 80 or 90% success rate. Replacing a top level leader is a great reason to make that change. You’ll get two trees with one stone: an A player leader and a drastic improvement in your hiring process. As Jim Collins found in his research for Good to Great, the foundation of a thriving company is “disciplined people”. This includes being a Level 5 leader (determined AND humble) and getting the right people on the bus in the right seats on our leadership team. Only then can we create a great strategy collaboratively with our leadership team, to achieve efficient team buyin. And with buyin and a great leadership team, we can implement the right structures, systems and processes to grow more rapidly, profitably and sustainably. Right? Not quite. This is where great execution comes in. In my next 5 Minute Growth Tip article, I’ll share the common challenges with executing a strategy and the three key execution disciplines to minimize drama and maximize profitability. How can you have more A-players in your company? To find out how to have stronger talent and leaders to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 2 to check your talent processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Systemization around branding and operations is a big missing link in many organizations. The disconnect occurs when Marketing sets an expectation and there are no standard operating procedures systematized throughout the customer's journey, aligning the experience with the expectation. In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches webinar and podcast, Brandon Dempsey, Author of Shut Up and Go, and Co-founder of St. Louis marketing company, goBRANDgo!, describes how the systemization of a brand creates cohesion and connects customers with the company. The Systems Attribute within the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth® framework is a key differentiator for Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches. Many mid-market companies don’t focus on Systems, and yet Systems are critical to scaling efficiently and profitably. Subscribe to Gravitas Impact podcast: Android How can you build systems to deliver on your brand?
To find out how to strengthen your systems to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 7 to check your company’s talent processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  As more business owners, CEOs and presidents become aware of leadership operating systems like Scaling Up and the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth, it’s important to remember that these frameworks stand on the shoulders of one of the first frameworks developed for mid-sized companies: Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, by Verne Harnish.
Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, like the methodologies that followed in its footsteps, describes a compilation of several tools developed and proven by other great thought leaders, and packaged for owners, CEOs and presidents of mid-sized companies. Released in 2001, the book, for the first time, brought together concepts like getting the right people doing the right things, creating a one page strategic plan, setting quarterly metrics and priorities, and having an effective meeting rhythm. Verne was inspired by the biography and executive team routines of the renowned John D. Rockefeller, who led Standard Oil for 19 years, as well as the practices of many other business leaders, like Jack Welch of GE, Tom Meredith of Dell, Tom Siebel of Siebel Systems and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. The best practices covered in Mastering the Rockefeller Habits are now corner-stones of the more recent Scaling Up system (also spear-headed by Verne Harnish) and the more holistic 7 Attributes of Agile Growth system, summarized in books by the same names. Yet Mastering the Rockefeller Habits is still worth the read. Beyond seeing some of these best practices from another perspective, there are a couple of tools that haven’t been carried forward into later systems: how to de-hassle your company (Chapter 7) and how to make banks compete to loan you money (Chapter 10). Scaling Up and the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth focus instead on finding cash from within the company (EOS doesn’t directly address cashflow and profitability). Yet, financing is still often needed. And Mastering the Rockefeller Habits provides some great advice on this. Book: 150 pages, 4 hour audio. GetAbstract Summary: 5 pages, 10 minute audio. How can you strengthen your team’s habits? To find out how to create more discipline on your executive team to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  STRATEGIES TO ATTRACT AND KEEP TOP TALENT In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are delighted to offer you a 25% discount to Hire, Coach and Keep “A” Players, with Chris Mursau. You might have heard about The Great Resignation phenomenon. In 2021, 1 in 5 Americans left their jobs, and almost a quarter are still considering it. It is a tough market to get talented people into your team, however it has never been more important to get this right. Chris Mursau is the president of Topgrading, an agency helping companies identify and recruit top talent. He has worked with Red Bull, Bank of America, and other Fortune 500 companies to help them assemble the best teams. These companies have tripled or even quadrupled their hiring successes thanks to Chris’ methods. He joins Growth Faculty in May for a 90-minute masterclass on the art of hiring well. He will take a deep dive into the Topgrading philosophy, how to attract A-players, as well as the red flags that often go unrecognised until it is too late. This is not to be missed by anyone who realises the power of the right person in the right seat. “It is extremely important to focus time on getting your hiring process right…. as much time as you spend getting any other process in the business right.” Chris Mursau - President of Topgrading Monday, May 17, 2022 - 8pm in MB, 7pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $130* | OUR NETWORK: $115* Click on “See more session times / currencies” to see the US/Canada time and currency. *Prices quoted in USD. How can you attract the best people?
To find out how to strengthen your recruitment and selection to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 2 to check your company’s talent processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  In the previous 5 Minute Growth Tip article, I wrote about how midsize companies can make more progress at implementing the processes and systems that will enable them to grow and grow profitably. But is it really progress if you’re not going in the right direction? And how do you know if you are going in the right direction?
While various types of processes and systems are needed to grow beyond a company’s current level (see the first article in this series), some types of systems will need to be chosen (or tailored) specifically for that unique business AND to support and execute its strategy in the market. Developing a clear strategy is not only important to making the right progress. It’s also important for ensuring a company is pursuing truly valuable growth opportunities. This brief article will cover the basics of clarifying and strengthening your strategy. From there, other tools and practices can be used to refine the strategy and make it more robust over time. The strategy misconception First, let’s recognize what strategy is NOT. As Jack Welch once put it, “Strategy is NOT a lengthy action plan. It is the evolution of a CENTRAL IDEA through continually changing circumstances.” A list of projects, priorities or action items is not strategy. That’s an execution plan. And what is this “central idea” Jack speaks of? I’ve been facilitating strategy development for 17 years. In all that time, the simplest, most accurate description of strategy I have come across is from Michael Porter, the renowned Harvard Business School professor, researcher and consultant. In his best selling book “Competitive Advantage”, Porter describes strategy succinctly as “a unique and valuable position in the market that involves a different set of activities from competitors”. Your “unique and valuable position in the market” is this “central idea”. And it needs to continually evolve to respond to changing circumstances. It describes the essence of the business you and your leadership team want to build. Your execution plan is how you’ll build it. Thinking of strategy as what needs to be done, rather than a vision for the business you are building, results in directionless busyness. Imagine building a house with no clear blueprints. How confusing would that be? It’s the same in a company. More Than Unique Let’s look at what Porter calls a “position in the market.” Put simply, this is about how your offering compares to competitors who offer the same or similar products or services. In the Scaling Up system and the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth, we use the term “Differentiation”. For most business leaders, like myself, it’s been drilled into our heads that our business needs to be unique. Porter confirms that this is important for our positioning. But why? To create customer loyalty. If our customers can only get our unique twist on a product or service from us, and they can’t get it from our competitors, they’ll keep coming back. Hence the more traditional terms used for Differentiation, including Unique Value Proposition, Unique Selling Proposition, Unique Offer and Competitive Advantage. They all essentially mean the same thing - a brief statement that describes how our product or service is or will be unique from our competitors. One example is SouthWest Airlines. While they provide air travel services like so many other airlines, they have clear differentiation, which is captured in their brand promise: “Low Fares, Lots of Flights, Lots of Fun”. This is unique in the american airline business. Yet Porter’s definition means our differentiation needs to be more than unique. It also has to be valuable. Valuable to who? Customers. Getting Focused This can be tricky. Because what’s valuable to one type of customer is not necessarily valuable to another. To make our differentiation valuable to a customer, we need to know WHO that customer is. Once we’re clear on who that customer is, we can define our differentiation, and then design our “different set of activities”, as Porter puts it, to consistently deliver that unique positioning. Note that, if we are to do things differently than competitors, to deliver on our differentiation for a specific type of customer, the number of different types of customers we serve has to be pretty small. Doing things in a number of unique ways that are each valuable to different types of customers becomes unprofitable, if not impossible, without sufficient scale. So for many companies, especially midsize companies, that often means focussing on one type of customer. We call them our Core Customer. How do we identify our core customer? We examine our best customers! The ones who are the most profitable, the most loyal, the most likely to refer, the ones who pay on time. In addition to knowing WHO are core customer IS, we have to know WHAT our core customer NEEDS. This enables us to then define differentiation that will be valuable to them. Without understanding our core customer’s needs, we’re just guessing. With clarity about who our core customer is, what they need and what differentiation would be valuable to them, we also want to make sure we can deliver on that differentiation. Maybe we aren’t fully set up right now to deliver on it. But we need to examine if we can get there. Regardless of our differentiation, those unique activities needed to deliver it need to be doable. If not, when we market our offering based on that differentiation, we’ll be making a promise to customers that we just can’t keep. Customers will be disappointed and become less loyal, rather than more loyal, over time. What Sandbox to Play In The Sandbox defines what specific products or services we’re going to offer, where we’re going to sell them, and through who. Through direct sales? Online? Through distributors, affiliates or retail? The Sandbox encourages us to proactively think through where our focus for growth needs to be over the next 3 to 5 years. It encourages focus also by proactively deciding to avoid products, geographies and distribution channels that will distract us. We may even choose to discontinue some we have right now. Choosing our Sandbox involves making sure these “what?”, “where?” and “through who?” decisions align with 1) our core customer, 2) our differentiation, and 3) our understanding or estimates of what products, geographies and distribution channels will provide the greatest opportunities for growth and profitability. SouthWest Airlines, for example, has determined that offering a first class service would not fit. It would take away from their “Lots of Fun” promise by treating some customers more lavishly than others. It would also increase complexity which would lengthen ground time, reduce the number of flights per day - “lots of flights”, and therefore increase costs and affect their “Low Fares” promise. Making it Work The three basic elements of a successful competitive strategy include:
This basic strategy work will be most successful when aligned with four foundational pieces: 1) our core purpose (or our Why, as Simon Sinek calls it - the difference we want to make in the world beyond creating jobs and profit), 2) our vision (or Big Hairy Audacious Goal - BHAG - as Jim Collins puts it - a 10 to 30 year company goal that is bold but stimulates innovation and progress), 3) our 3 year strategic targets - including financial, non-financial, - and 3 year highly achievable goal (or 3HAG as Shannon Byrne Susko calls it) that defines what we want the company to look like, 4) an awareness and understanding of the trends unfolding in our market and the world. And let’s remember, as CEOs, we’re best off developing our strategy collaboratively with our leadership team, in order to achieve “efficient leadership team buy-in” that supports “accountability for execution” (as discussed in my previous article). From there, we can develop our one year and quarterly execution plan to bring our strategy to life. With the right leadership team members and the right culture, we can execute with efficiency and predictability. AND, with the right leadership team members and culture, we are much more likely to develop a great strategy with that team. More about that in my next 5 Minute Growth Tip article. How can you improve your strategy? To find out what you can improve in your competitive strategy to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete sections 3 and 6 to check your competitive strategy. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  There are many keys to successful execution…priorities, alignment, measurement, lean principles, and more. However, the most critical element is having the right high-performing leadership team around the CEO/President of the company. Bar none. In this Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches webinar, Sean Knutsen, CEO & Co-Founder of Boveda in Minnesota, talks about his experience successfully building High Performance Leadership Teams. Boveda Inc. is the leading producer of 2-way humidity control solutions for a variety of moisture-sensitive products, including cigars and cannabis. Becoming the global leader in any category doesn’t happen overnight. Becoming the global leader in a category that didn’t even exist is even harder. But that’s what Boveda did and continues to do since 1997. How can you build a high performance leadership team?
To find out how to develop a great top team to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Find out how your leadership team is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  As you work with your leadership team on building your business and organization to grow more easily, profitably and sustainably, it helps to have a methodology or set of tools to use, rather than figuring out on your own what best practices to implement.
Over the 17 years I’ve been working with CEOs and their leadership teams, I’ve learned to implement a half dozen methodologies, including the Scaling Up method and the 7 Attributes of Growth tools. Traction, a book written by Gino Wickman, summarizes another such methodology: EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System). Like Scaling Up and the 7 Attributes of Growth, it goes beyond setting mere mission, vision, values and priorities to also address people and execution. This isn’t coincidental. Gino was a coach in our network several years ago and used our tools. He then founded his own network of coaches and wrote Traction to capture his approach. Scaling Up and the 7 Attributes of Growth were written since that time and included many best practices that Gino did not, like the daily huddle and cash flow optimization tools. That said, Gino includes a couple of unique tools I have found useful, for example, the People Analyser and the Visionary-Integrator model, which I sometimes implement with the CEOs and leadership teams I work with. The People Analyser is a simple form to quickly evaluate each employee against the company’s core values. The companies I work with use this as input to our talent assessment where leadership team members assess each of their direct reports and then hold each other accountable to coach them up or out. The Visionary-Integrator model is a way for dynamic, creative owners and CEOs to pick and effectively work with a co-CEO who is stronger in the disciplined, structured and organizational aspects of running the company that are needed to enable predictable, profitable and sustainable growth. It enables the owners to do what they do best while also having someone with the other critical skills needed to truly move the business forward. Gino packages the best practices he selected into the six areas of EOS: Vision (including high level strategy and execution planning), People, Data (metrics), Issues, Process and Traction (meeting rhythms). EOS and Traction is a solid, simple approach with easy-to-use tools. In my experience, it works best for smaller companies up to about 25 employees. Beyond that, there tend to be certain challenges that come up that EOS doesn’t address, for example: leadership team cohesiveness, team member productivity, effective hiring, leadership mindset, cascading metrics, planning priorities, clear competitive strategy and financial optimization, planning and forecasting. By contrast, Scaling Up and the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth include most of the best practices found in EOS, and also address these additional challenges as they come up. The 7 Attributes of Agile Growth then go beyond to tackle some of the more nuanced challenges of growth like customer experience, systems and change and leaders’ health. See last month’s Book of the Month for more information. If you’re looking for a simplified methodology with user-friendly terminology and a detailed how-to playbook to get started implementing a set of best practices, Traction may do the trick. Book: 251 pgs, 6h56m audio. How can you get more traction? To find out how to make more progress to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  HARNESSING THE POWER OF TRUST In partnership with Growth Faculty, we are delighted to offer you a 10% discount to Live Book Club Event - Trust & Inspire, with Stephen M. R. Covey. Research tells us trust in leaders is at an all-time low. Yet trust has never been more essential for effective leadership. How do we make sense of this paradox? Join us on 26 April 2022 for a live virtual book club with Stephen M. R. Covey to discuss his ground-breaking book Trust & Inspire. Stephen is an acclaimed thought leader, advisor and organisational expert. He increased the shareholder value of Covey Leadership Centre seventy-fold while CEO, and today he is an expert on the relationship between trust, inspiration and businesses which stand the test of time. Do not miss this event. Sign up today while tickets are still available so you can learn to:
Monday, April 25, 2022 - 8pm in MB, 7pm in SK NON-MEMBER: $75* | OUR NETWORK: $69* *Prices quoted in USD. How can you build trust and inspire your people?
To find out how to lead more effectively to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 1 to check your company’s leadership processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation. |
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