A Growth Formula for Small Businesses

A Growth Formula for Small Businesses

What you’ll learn

  • Understand the formula they need to drive their business beyond the startup phase and achieve massive growth.
  • Develop a Scale Up plan for their businesses.
  • Be aware of the challenges they can expect to face as they transition from Start Ups to Scale Ups

Description

So, you have successfully started your own company, proven to your friends, family and the bank that it is a viable business, won some loyal and happy customers or clients and maybe even started to make a small profit.

Congratulations! (It is said that most new businesses fail within the first few years, so yours is already a success story.)

What’s next? Do you want to:

  1. stay small with a lifestyle business that gives you modest lifestyle and the freedom that comes from working for yourself, or
  2. keep growing your business, expanding into new markets and territories, increasing sales and profits and building a business that you can sell in the future?

If you chose option 2 then you will need to transition your business from the startup phase, in which most major business functions are performed by you, or small team around you, into Scale Up mode.

This means implementing new systems to make your business operations more efficient and reliable, finding new marketing and distribution channels to boost sales and exploiting all of the growth opportunities within your business.

And yes: scaling up your business will require you to change your mindset and transition from being a hands-on entrepreneur to CEO, providing strategic leadership and empowering your teams to achieve success.

In this introductory course, entrepreneur and business growth coach Russell Streeter will show you:

  • The exact formula you need to scale up your business.
  • How to prepare your business for scaling up and systemise it for more efficient and reliable operations.
  • The common challenges and traps that trip up high growth businesses – and how to avoid them.

Who this course is for:

Entrepreneurs who have taken their businesses through the start up phase, have proven the concept, started to make a profit and now are now ready to scale up and achieve growth rates of 20-50% per year.

Course content

Day 1: Introduction

In this lecture I tell the story of how one organisation went from also-ran status to world domination by making improvements in many different areas.  As human beings, we view success as the destination – the summit of Mount Everest, the finishing line in the marathon, or tripling the size of your business. And from where we are sitting that destination can look quite far away…and difficult to picture.

But what if we viewed success not as a destination, but as a journey? A journey that consists of many goals, some simple, others ambitious, but all within the limits of our own capabilities.

Day 1: Redefining Success 

How do you develop a “marginal gains” strategy for your business? Using the Seven Keys Formula, you focus your efforts in the areas of the business that will have the greatest impact on growth and long term business value.

Day 1: The Seven Keys Formula 

In this video I put some numbers into the Seven Keys Formula so that you can see how powerful it can be, and why you need to focus your efforts on these key areas.

Illustration

Now that you have seen how the Seven Keys Formula works, use the Business Growth Calculator to put it into action by developing a Scale Up plan for your business for the next 12 months. Watch the video and then download the spreadsheet in the “Resources” section.

Business Growth Calculator 

If your business depends on you in order to function, it will be unable to grow beyond a certain point, simply because you only have 24 hours in each day (and you have to sleep for at least some of them).

Therefore, if you are serious about business growth, you must transform the business so that it runs without you being there all the time. The final factor in the Formula, and perhaps the most important, is SYSTEMISATION. It’s not the “eighth Key” because it is important at every stage of your Scale-Up Journey.

By the end of this lecture you will learn the steps required to systemise your business, as well as some of the most common business processes.

Systemisation

The common challenges that high-growth businesses face include cash flow pressures, financing shortfalls, recruitment and the operational impact of expansion. Please download the document in the “resources@ section for more details.

The Challenges of Scaling Up

The common challenges that high-growth businesses face include cash flow pressures, financing shortfalls, recruitment and the operational impact of expansion.