Why?

In a competitive world, growth is vital for survival. If your company is not growing, it’s dying. You also need to maximize your economic prime’s impact as a business owner and become the best you can be to maximize that return-on-time during your prime.

Successful growth sees revenues and profits increase on a consistent, reliable basis. That would be fine in a less competitive world. To maintain and grow your market share you need to grow well above industry growth rates. To get this done, need to be investing 70% of your time on NLG.

What goes wrong?

• Clarity of purpose – growth today needs to be driven by intention tomorrow. Being clear about why you do what you do and what you want from your business over time leads to simpler, crisper decisions and leadership
• More time leading, less time doing – If your time is consumed in daily, weekly, monthly operational activities such as crisis management, failures in delegation, rework, unscheduled communications, administration, and the like, your ambitions to generate sustainable NLG are likely to falter.
• Freedom within a framework – because you carry all the risk, your ability to delegate responsibility and control over elements of the business to your team impacts your time demands and their confidence
• Finding, winning, and holding customers – crafting and implementing marketing and sales strategies that get traction and stick result in brand confusion and low profitability
• Growth drives chaos – when you grow, chaos across operations and administration pull you back into the guts of your business and erode profit
• Right people doing the right thing – without the right skills, commitment, and effort from your team, you remain square and center in daily operations. Getting your team to do the heavy lifting is essential
• Growth – when your NLG disassembles the operational activities in your business, creates confusion and uncertainty in your team. It will not deliver increased profit at a higher rate than increased revenue. Increasing revenues with rising costs increases the quantum of profit, not its value, complexity, and risk.

The Solution

We will work with you

• See the wood from the trees – run diagnostics to understand the foundation upon which growth is driven, the space into which growth can be accelerated, the levers that point to where growth lies, and the aptitudes of you and your partners, which can best be utilized to win the growth you want
• Clarify purpose into 10, crisply defined, measurable growth goals and load them onto your company dashboard. Monthly we will evaluate progress towards the goals to ensure that they are achieved in our time together.

Working with you and your team, we will:

• Position your business to deepen market share in amongst all the noise, change, and competition in your market
• Organize all your commercial functions into a single, simple, smart system of deliveryto generate consistent organic growth
• Engage with your team to create the commercial systems, embracing their insights to engender ownership, value, and accountability so that they run and lead the system of delivery to release 70% of your time
• Apply that available time to identify next-level growth opportunities that leverage your system of delivery and team to ensure that revenue growth is supported by moderated cost growth to deepen profit
• Collecting data across all the systems to support decision-making further builds a body of evidence in support of any capital raise efforts, essential to fuel that growth.

The Outcome

Structure determines behavior, which generates an outcome determined by the design of that structure. Simplifying the design of your business scales it. Successfully done, your path to accelerated growth will deepen value and let you spend your time where it counts most, next-level growth

How we make it happen

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Why it matters?

Succession of a business is fraught with emotional and practical challenges, whether in family businesses or across the professional services sector. Success is rare, with 73% of succession attempts failing at a significant cost to the founders, successors, employees, customers, and suppliers.

For family businesses, failure costs both generations the family’s wealth-generating and emotional wellbeing. In private companies, it erodes or stalls the retirement wellbeing of the exiting generation and robs the next generation of their future wealth creation path. All lose.

What goes wrong?

• Mindsets – The exiting generation has an eye on retirement and their final wealth generation through a sale of shares. Successors look to carve a wealth creation path in the years ahead through reinvestment. The conflict, conscious or not, seeds the frustration experienced by both the timing and method of succession. The different mindsets prevent effective planning or erode trust and the relationship increasing the complexity, judgment, and probability of succession success.
• Relationships – poor timing, planning, and method in succession create confusion and noise in the business ecosystem. Customer and supplier uncertainty creates doubt and fear, often stalling or changing tac on the succession process and its timing, costing the parties and the company.
• Value – Neither party has likely valued a company before, and conflicting agendas further impede successful succession. The exiting generation needs to maximize their value as their last wealth-generating act before retirement. The succeeding generation needs certainty that they can afford the acquisition.
• Timing – the fear of exiting a business by the founding generation is often realized late in the process. Questions on their value and psychology begin to arise, and fear often shows as a reticence to proceed, which the succeeding generation may misconstrue. Once resolved, the timing issues center on the transfer and payment of the shares. The succeeding generation typically requires payment terms, having had no prior opportunity to accumulate capital to acquire the shares. This creates uncertainty and apprehension in the exiting generation who relinquish control, without full payment, that could see their successors erode the value of their yet-to-be-paid-out retirement.
• Transparency and plan – decisions on successors, the process adopted for the transfer of responsibilities, and the final value and terms of succession can harm the relationships across the company. Good, loyal, capable employees are overlooked because of poorly motivated decisions or poorly planned communications, causing animosity and anxiety through the succession attempt.

Solution

If you’re exiting, your successors will pay you out over time, and you need to be confident that they can operate, run and grow the business without your input. Should they raise capital to acquire their shares, they’d need to meet the requirements of a funding source.

We work with you to develop a structured succession plan that is practical and measurable to

• Transfer operational and commercial responsibility, over time to successors

Working with you and your leadership team or family members to:

• Align leadership – run diagnostics to ground-truth and align the understanding of the companies foundation, future growth strategy, team dynamics, and current numbers
• Set the future goals together – 10, crisply defined, measurable growth goals, and load them onto your company dashboard. Monthly we will evaluate progress towards the goals to ensure their achievement and the structured transfer of responsibilities between the generations
• Create a schedule of activities over time to transfer the responsibility of the business functions in a structured, methodical manner that draws on the experience, insight, and learnings of the exiting generations alongside the activation and implementation of the activities, incorporating the wisdom to build out the future business
• Transfer leadership and relations across customers, suppliers, and employees between generations to manage relationship expectations and maintain stability
• Set up and establish a monthly, performance-based engagement between the generations to the sign-off transfer of blocks of responsibility and set the post-handover relationship between the generations with the exiting generation assuming a shareholding-investor-advisor role and succeeding generation taking an owner-operator-leader role
• Collecting data across all the systems to support decision-making to moderate decisions, align the parties, ensure objective engagements
• Build a valuation framework that aligns both generations on the fair value of the business for eventual acquisition and sale of shares to reward the exiting generation and motivate the succeeding generation

The Outcome

An inclusive, structured, time-based engagement to reliably handover in a risk-managed process, the responsibilities of the business operations and strategy, align the expectations between the exiting and succeeding generation on the company’s future direction plus establishes the framework for the transfer of responsibilities while ensuring facilitated communications, the use of data to moderate and guide decisions and the development of respect between the generations. Allows for the alignment on valuation, terms of payment, conditions of handover to preserve the wealth payout for the exiting and wealth creation path for the succeeding.

How we make it happen

Contact us