Scaling Your Business
by Matt Zemon

Once your business is up and running, keeping it healthy and growing requires different activities and skills. In his book Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make it... and Why the Rest Don't, Verne Harnish offers some great ideas that are worth a look.

Verne begins by pointing out that the secret to scaling your business is first asking questions about four key areas that are pivotal to growth: People, Strategy, Execution and Cash. His book offers sample questions in each area to get you thinking about the questions that are important to your own unique business.

Hiring and managing people can be challenging for entrepreneurs who tend to be focused on doing rather than delegating. So take a look at whom you have already hired and ask yourself whether the right people are doing the right things. What are the strengths of each employee and are they making the most of those strengths in their current positions?  Next, motivate people by making it is simple for them to excel and then show them your appreciation when they succeed. Take your front line seriously and hire fewer high quality people that get paid more and you will outshine your competition.  

Your scaling strategy should be simple and easy to communicate with a singular focus on driving sustainable growth in both revenue and gross margins. Verne Harnish addresses two distinct parts of building your strategy: strategic thinking and execution planning. Senior leaders should guide strategic thinking with weekly meetings. Executing the plan must involve middle management and the front line with monthly, quarterly and annual Key Performance Indicators. Keeping your eye on the ball with continuous attention to strategic objectives and a flexible approach to execution is critical to success. In his Think, Plan, Act, and Learn cycle of strategic planning, Verne offers some great tools to keep focused and agile as your grow.

Once you have thought through the strategy, your success will depend on getting the execution right and that hinges on efficiency. A great place to start is by delivering the best phone service to everyone who touches your business. As a board member of www.liveanswer.com, I have seen what great 24/7 phone service can do for customer satisfaction and staff efficiency. It can help you outsell your competition- you never know when that marketing campaign is going to really work and no one wants to miss sales calls! By placing your phone in the hands of professionals, three things happen.  First, you are forced to think through the process of exactly how you want your phone calls answered rather than leaving it in the hands of each individual employee to "figure this out".  Second, you will know you have phone coverage 24 hours a day, seven days a week regardless of who is on vacation or in a meeting.  Finally, you can use this tool to collect valuable customer information to confirm and/or tweak your direction. Verne Harnish believes that regularly gathering and using quantitative and qualitative data is pivotal to maintaining focus. When you know what is really happening you can make better decisions.  Direct from the customer information can be powerful when it is captured methodically.

There is a definite limit to how far the best ideas and people will get you if you don't have cash. Cash is what sustains all businesses, but especially those that are growing. Gleaning more cash from what you sell may be the most important thing you can do to ensure long-term stability and success. You can make this a priority and know exactly where you stand at all times by developing what Mr. Harnish calls a Daily Available Cash Report. It should include what cash is available and why it changed since yesterday along with assessment against both accounts receivable and accounts payable. This daily financial snapshot will keep your cash position front and center as you make decisions.

These are just a few of the highlights from Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make it... and Why the Rest Don't, by Verne Harnish.  The book itself is well worth the read and has a lot of useful details and helpful tools for military spouse entrepreneurs.

GOOD SIDEBAR FOR THE ARTICLE:

While you are buying Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make it... and Why the Rest Don't, you may also consider books by these other authors Verne recommends, including:

• Nir Eyal -- author of Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products (the must-read book in Silicon Valley)

• Christine Comaford -- serial entrepreneur and author of SmartTribes: How Teams Become Brilliant Together (Bill Gates calls her "super high bandwidth" and she has advised two US Presidents)

• John Sviokla -- author of The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value (John and his co-author have special access to these billionaires)

• David Meerman Scott -- author of The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content and Storytelling to Grow Your Business (David has done for sales in this book what he did for marketing in his first book).

• Paul Akers -- author of 2 Second Lean: How to Grow People and Build a Fun Lean Culture at Work & at Home (this is some cool, simple, stuff - check him out on YouTube).

• Nick Nanton -- 3 time Emmy Award winner and author of Story Selling: Hollywood Secrets Revealed How To Sell Without Selling (with over 2200 clients in 33 countries, Nick's firm has produced large scale events and television shows with the likes of Steve Forbes, Brian Tracy, President George H.W. Bush, Jack Canfield (Creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul Series), Michael E. Gerber, Tom Hopkins and many more.)

• John Warrillow -- author of what Verne believes will be the best biz book in 2015, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry.

 

Matt Zemon is the President & CEO of American Support, an inbound and outbound telesales provider to 5 of the top 10 cable companies in America, one of the "Top 10 places in the cable industry to work" according to CableFax magazine and one of the world's "Most Democratic Organizations" as certified by WorldBlu. Zemon is also the COO for LiveAnswer, an on-demand call center.

Zemon is co-President of Jobs4America, the Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the National Military Spouse Network and a board member of Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) Raleigh Durham.   

 

Have a question about your business plan for Matt? Ask here. Your question/answer may be printed in a future issue.