Too Busy Working to Grow Your Business?
Source: Ric Payne's Blog
Following includes excerpts from a May 28, 2010, blog post by Ric Payne, reproduced with permission.
In this entry, Ric discusses the importance of continually investing time and energy to grow your business, rather than focusing only on the “business of doing business.”
When a new business is started, hunger for growth leads to the founder(s) being very active on the marketing front. They spend a lot of time working ON their business, as Mr. Gerber says. When they get busy doing the technical things the business does, i.e., the IN stuff, they take their eye off the ON things and the business stagnates.
I have a simple (perhaps over simplistic) theory: the reason many, if not most, established practices hit a growth brick wall is that the people who inherit a leadership role have not been mentored and seasoned as “business growers.” Their training, experience, performance expectation and financial reward have been as “business doers.”
There's a flip side to that theory. The reason most practices that were started by the present owner(s) hit a brick wall after a few years is that they start to make enough money to get by and are not willing to “risk” what they've built up in the pursuit of more growth.
I would argue:
- quality team members will not hang around in slow growth, no opportunity, environments.
- practice values in the future will increasingly be based on growth prospects (reflected by growth experience), client quality and loyalty, team member quality and loyalty, service design and margin. These are not typically things that score very highly in slow (or no) growth firms.
- Peter Drucker told us in 1973, there's only one purpose of a business: to create a customer.
To read the entire post, click here.
From Ric Payne's Blog — Confessions of a Lazy Accountant, http://theconsultingaccountant.com, May 28, 2010, “My old man used to say, don't just stand there do something!”