Are you growing or just growing older?

Even a moderately managed business should grow. All things being equal there is something very wrong if we aren’t gaining more customers than we are losing, if our unit cost of production is rising faster than our sales value, if we are losing ground to competitors. Even inflation should work in favour of our growth. So don’t think that 3 or 4 percentage points is growth, basic growth in the population and prices should give us that.

Yet so often we kid ourselves that single digit growth is a big achievement. Scale Up businesses are those that grow at a rate of 20% per year for at least three years. That is a different level altogether, it compounds to be roughly a doubling in size every three years. That level of growth doesn’t happen by chance. It is purposeful, deliberate and planned. It requires skill and change to make it happen.

At 3 or 4 percentage points of growth you are probably just treading water, which means in reality you are going backwards and to do that you are probably working harder than ever. No wonder entrepreneurs end up getting tired rather than rich.

So what needs to happen to change the game and change the outcome? Well, a lot of things as it happens. Among the first is your ambition. If you think single digit growth is the best that you can do you then you will prove yourself right. Once you have set your sights higher you will need to deal with the realities of making it happen.

Peter Drucker said that the bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle, which means that if you are at the top of your organisation the chances are that you are the bottleneck. The thing that limits most businesses is the inability of the leaders to manage the ever increasing complexity of a scaling business. Leadership ability, or Leadership quotient as I sometimes call it, is the real glass ceiling on growth. As David Packard once said, ‘More businesses die of indigestion than starvation.’

If you really want to grow the business, first you need to grow yourself and your leadership team. This will be the foundation and the catalyst of your purposeful, deliberate growth. As Albert Einstein told us, ‘We can’t solve our problems with the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.’ And so, you won’t achieve scaling levels of growth as you are now. Working harder won’t do it for you. You are working hard now. In the same way as the winning F1 car of last season will need to be reengineered to win it again this year your whole operating, leadership and execution system will need to be reengineered to achieve something you have never achieved before. Notice I said reengineered, not tweaked or polished, reengineered.

To grow your business do these things

1. Set your BHAG™ (Big Hairy Audacious Goal ™Jim Collins). Something worth going after that will stretch you.
2. Work out your why. Why is achieving this important to you? Hint: it probably isn’t money. It has to really matter. Friedrich Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how,” expressing the idea that a deep sense of purpose gives human beings the strength to endure even severe hardship.
3. Work out what you think you will need to learn to do to make the BHAG happen. It won’t be perfect but it will, at least, give you an idea of the gap you need to leap.
4. Find yourself someone who can help you learn what you need to learn and hold you accountable to doing what you need to do. If you could do this on your own you would have already done it.
5. Get after it. It is about taking massive action.

As one of my coaches said to me, ‘we know what we know but we don’t know what we don’t know and it is always what we don’t know that costs us’. However, none of us can ever know what we don’t know. The only way to find out is through a conversation and that is called a coaching conversation. Then and only then can you begin to truly think at a higher level so that you can perform at a higher level.

Every day you will be growing. Growing older. But to make sure you are truly growing in ability and performance you need to have deliberate and purposeful plan to achieve that.