A growth mindset and a business design that creates resistance and agility

We recently surveyed a few hundred business owners, asking each what they saw as their biggest growth impediment.

The top 3 are

1. Scale – how do you build a system of growth
2. People—how do you find, manage, and lead your people?
3. Growth mindset—how do you maintain an inventive, positively inspired outlook and action in the environment of business that we face today?

In this podcast of the Money Show, Pavlo unpacks an approach to deal with each of these big challenges to growth:

Scale

This is about business design. Like a ship, building, plane, or train, it is designed and built to serve a particular need. An office tower is designed differently from a shopping centre. They serve different audiences and fulfil different needs. They are designed to optimise their ability to meet these needs most efficiently.

The design of your business, too, must be thought through. What’s different in a business is that the design needs to shift and change as the business grows. Most companies I’ve seen operate with a business model suited to half or even a third of the current revenues of the company. It’s as if the businesses are stuck in a start-up or early stage of business design even though they are achieving revenues 2 to 3 times their maturity. It’s unsustainable and eventually kills you or the value you have created over years of effort.

People

Finding the right people to do the right thing all the time is a global challenge. Talented people are essential to growth. If talented people occupy a growth mindset and work on a business built for scale, you create a nucleus of growth in the industry.

Skilled people look to innovate. That means creating more value. If coupled with a scalable business, that innovation leads to growth. Competitors with talented people respond, and the competitive cycle kicks in, attracting funding, talent, and more innovation. It creates vibrancy and growth across and through the industry.

In an environment where talent is draining away or cannot be afforded because of its scarcity, the design of your business is key to getting your people element right. A simple business is scalable and needs a design that changes as the business grows.

The other impediment to getting the people piece right is delegation. Suppose you do not develop a delegation framework that lets you delegate effectively. In that case, you will always be pulled back into the engine room of the business. You eventually get worn to the bone, lose all inspiration and passion, and slowly erode the value you have created. Getting delegation right is about two things.

You and your attitude to delegation and what and how you delegate.

As a business owner, delegation should be your primary function. If you don’t believe in people, you don’t think anyone can do it as well as you or as fast as you. Suppose you harbour deep in your unconscious mind a fear of success that sees you erode the passion and inspiration of your team, amongst other things. In that case, you need to get some perspective. Fear of success is deeply unconscious, and it remains one of the greatest impediments to growth that I’ve come across.

How you delegate is equally essential. Most business owners delegate instructions, and this opens up misunderstandings that begin to break down trust and confidence. When someone doesn’t do what you told them to do, what attitude do you eventually hold toward them? The key to unlocking delegation is delegating a system of activities that can be measured and produce a definable outcome.

Mindset

Many challenges are being faced across all economies globally. Inflation, cost of capital, access to capital, talent, supply lines, energy concerns, war, currency fluctuations, and political mismanagement are some of the many issues experienced everywhere. So, it’s not personal. And that’s the most important thing to consider. It becomes personal if you allow it to wear you down. You end up wearing lenses that highlight everything wrong and wear yourself down further. And with that, everything wrong begins to dominate your day, seeding depression and anxiety. You can get trapped in that space. Ask yourself then, what does that achieve? An alternative is to create a different reality and to do so by creating a morning mantra – I’ll only focus on what it can control.

When you disconnect from the internet, the anxiety and stress caused by various realities disappears. Next, recognize that what’s wrong in your industry is wrong for all. It’s not personal. Your competitors are suffering from the same challenges. It makes for an equal playing field.

To get ahead, adopt a growth mindset that says we will grow despite everything that is wrong. That pair of lenses lets you see the challenges as an opportunity to get ahead of your competitors, which means growth. As an outcome, it breeds positivity and feeds inspiration. You are in control of it all. If you struggle to get to the other side of a negative mindset, get some help. An outside perspective is valuable and can prevent you from wasting months or years of your precious, valuable time, which you can never get back.