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Elite Business: Strategic resilience in a tariff-impacted world: A practical blueprint for UK exporters

Elite Business: Strategic resilience in a tariff-impacted world: A practical blueprint for UK exporters

Written by Lindokuhle Ntombela on . Posted in Asset of Value, Creating time, Innovation, Insights, Leadership, Mindset, Team, Trends.

In this article, originally featured in Elite Business: Rising U.S. tariffs are set to disrupt global supply chains, tighten margins, and push inflation and interest rates higher

Rising U.S. tariffs are set to disrupt global supply chains, tighten margins, and push inflation and interest rates higher. For exporters, this means higher costs and unpredictable market conditions.

The key to thriving in this environment is resilience—guarding against risks while seizing new opportunities.
A brand exporting manufactured products must act decisively to keep operations agile, cost-efficient, and market responsive. Here’s a practical blueprint to navigate these challenges effectively.

Reinforcing the foundation

Why it works

Relying on a single source is vulnerable. Spreading orders across multiple suppliers reduces risks from tariff hikes and supply disruptions and allows for negotiation with existing suppliers.

Example: A hair extension distributor once sourced Remy hair exclusively from Italy. When an earthquake disrupted supply, the company turned to an alternative provider in Brazil. This move secured supply and introduced a lower-cost fighter brand, making their offering more competitive and resilient.

Localize production or assembly

Action: Shift parts of the production process to the U.S. or regions with favourable trade agreements.

Why it works: Partial localisation can bypass tariffs, reduce lead times, and improve market responsiveness.

Example: A U.S. engineering firm expanding across Africa partnered with a local geospatial intelligence supplier. This move provided on-the-ground insights, strengthened relationships with regional governments, and led to a preferred status on new projects.

Optimize inventory and production processes

Action: Build a safety stock of key materials and apply lean manufacturing principles.

Why it works: Holding essential inventory shields against supply disruptions, lean processes reduce waste and lower costs, making operations more resilient. Tariff-induced inflation also makes holding stock a strategic store of value.

Example: A biker clothing brand struggled with denim shortages in China. When a factory’s large order was cancelled, the company capitalised on the opportunity, securing bulk denim at a favourable price. This stabilised supply and provided a higher return than cash in the bank.

Adjust pricing strategies and product configurations

Action: Develop flexible pricing models and redesign products to minimise tariff-sensitive components.

Why it works: Passing every cost increase to customers is unsustainable. Innovative pricing and product adjustments help maintain a competitive edge while protecting margins.

Example: A company splits its value proposition between a physical product and essential services. While the product attracted tariffs, the services did not.

Build strong, local partnerships

Action: Establish relationships with U.S.-based distributors and retailers.

Why it works: Local partners provide market access, logistical support, and insights, accelerating market penetration while mitigating tariff impact.

Example: When Brexit hit, many exporters partnered with Dutch distributors to share warehouse space and logistics resources. This strategy minimised tariff exposure and expanded their European presence and relevance.

Embrace continuous innovation

Action: Invest in R&D to improve products and explore new materials.

Why it works: Innovation ensures competitiveness even as cost pressures rise.

Example: A German company invested in a green steel plant in Namibia, gaining access to carbon credits and eco-friendly credentials. This move strengthened its market position in Northern Europe, where sustainable products command a premium.

Expand market reach

Action: Reduce dependence on the U.S. by targeting alternative international markets.

Why it works: Diversifying across multiple regions spreads risk and uncovers new growth opportunities.

Example: Nando’s, initially a South African brand, expanded globally by franchising to South African expatriates. Similarly, rising UK emigration has opened new markets in the UAE, Singapore, and the U.S., where British nationals are investing and relocating.

Strengthen brand positioning through authentic storytelling

Action: Enhance marketing by showcasing your brand’s heritage, quality, and innovation.

Why it works: A strong brand narrative builds customer loyalty and justifies premium pricing, even when costs rise.

Example: British heritage brands like Brompton Bicycles and Denby Pottery emphasise their craftsmanship and local production advantages, creating deep emotional connections with consumers.

The path forward

This is not a theoretical exercise—it’s a practical roadmap for exporters facing a tariff-driven landscape. Companies can strengthen their defensive position by diversifying supply chains, localising operations, and optimizing production. Meanwhile, forging strong partnerships, continuously innovating, and expanding into new markets create opportunities for sustained growth.

The key to long-term success is adaptability. Implement these steps, stay alert to market shifts, and refine your approach as conditions evolve. A well-executed strategy ensures your brand thrives in an ever-changing global economy.

Elite Business: New era for employer-employee dynamics

Elite Business: New era for employer-employee dynamics

Written by Lindokuhle Ntombela on . Posted in Asset of Value, Creating time, Innovation, Insights, Leadership, Mindset.

In this article, originally featured in Elite Business: Structure Determines Behaviour,” new employment legislation presents an opportunity to reshape our approach to finding, training, and retaining talent.

In response to the Labour budget, I recently facilitated a roundtable engagement with angry business owners. The deeply furrowed brows of concerned senior leaders concluded with a paradigm shift that opened new growth pathways.

WATCH more on this here

The recent UK budget and tightened employment laws may feel like an attack on business, but they also present an opportunity to redefine how we structure our organisations. The post-COVID remote work and the post-Brexit skills crisis have stretched and reshaped the traditional employer-employee compact. This could be the perfect moment to rethink and rebuild for businesses looking to thrive.

The value exchange in employment

At its core, the employer-employee relationship is a value exchange. A business pays a salary or bonus to derive measurable value from the employee’s work. Yet, many organisations need to quantify this exchange effectively, leaving them vulnerable to inefficiencies and misaligned expectations. If we can measure the value of tangible assets like machinery, why not apply the same principle to our people?

Consider the machine in a cheese-slicing business. The machine’s performance is precisely measurable: slicing 528 monthly blocks under optimal conditions. The operator’s role, which includes setting up, running, and maintaining the machine, can also be broken into measurable activities. This clarity in defining measurable tasks allows for more effective recruitment, value exchange and performance management. Each party knows what’s expected of them!

This same approach can—and should—be applied to every role in your business. It’s even more necessary in a services business where the assets (your people) walk out the door every evening. By viewing roles as systems comprising sequential, measurable activities, you unlock opportunities to improve recruitment, streamline performance management, and ultimately increase your return on employment.

Systems thinking for a changing workforce

The escalating costs and risks of employment demand a new way of thinking. Systematising work not only improves clarity but also highlights activities that can be digitised or automated. This frees employees from mundane tasks to give their time and attention to more interesting work. It also allows leaders to focus on core, strategic areas as they lighten their management load through effective, sticky delegation, which also helps reduce fixed costs.

This method addresses immediate challenges and builds resilience. Systematic roles and processes simplify delegation, training, and scaling. Far from constraining employees, it gives them freedom within a framework to fully express their potential in a role. As employment laws become stricter and employment costs rise, this structured approach offers sustainability, cost management, productivity gains, and resilience.

Engineering for the future

The Labour government’s changes may feel like a setback, but they invite us to rethink how we structure work. Redefining roles into systems will improve your recruitment success, employee tenure, and productivity and open pathways to digitisation, automation, and outsourcing. In this, a more agile business can be built, and without compromising customer experiences, a less cumbersome salary bill will help lighten the load of senior leaders to focus on what counts – growth.

When structure determines behaviour, thoughtful engineering of your business systems and roles can turn the challenge presented by Labour into opportunities.

Exhausted and overwhelmed? How to break the cycle of cognitive burnout

Elite Business: Exhausted and overwhelmed? How to break the cycle of cognitive burnout

Written by Lindokuhle Ntombela on . Posted in Asset of Value, Creating time, Insights, Leadership, Team.

In this article, originally featured in Elite Business: Simplifying your business focus is a necessary and effective approach to easing cognitive burnout and re-energising yourself and your business.

As business leaders we face constant decisions, information, and pressures, leaving many exhausted and disillusioned. While it might seem like an inevitable part of business, this mental drain has a specific cause. George Parsons’ research into cognitive overload tells us that our brains can only juggle so much at once. When flooded with demands, we slip into a “freeze, fight, flight, or fawn” state, similar to how the body reacts under threat. If left unchecked, this cycle of overload and avoidance can paralyse decision-making.

To remain effective, regain control and break the burnout cycle, we need to simplify our business focus.

Understanding cognitive overload and the cost of ‘doing everything’

Running a business has become a lot more complex as a result of Brexit, COVID, skills crises, the cost of living, collapsing infrastructure, and morphing tax, climate, and employment legislation in a moribund economy. This load is compounded by the 24/7/365 information cycle—endless streams of news, events, and opinions accessible around the clock via digital channels. Each input demands attention, shifting focus and energy from meaningful decisions to constant reactions.

When constantly overwhelmed, our brains struggle to manage it all, slipping into cognitive overload. George Parsons’ research on memory says that our brains handle around 7 (give or take 2) pieces of information at a time, and operating beyond this causes lapses, errors, and mental strain. The freezing, fighting, fleeing, or fawning, behaviour often seen in business decisions. The result? Fatigue, hesitation, and even avoidance in making choices.

Instead of stretching to meet every demand, the answer may lie in slimming down: identifying who you serve best, what problems you solve, and aligning your business around that specific purpose.

Simplifying through purpose: Shift from selling to solving

If you’re feeling drained, it may be time to refocus on a core purpose—moving from merely selling products and services to solving tangible problems for a defined customer group. Rather than trying to attract everyone, determine your addressable market, not just anyone who could buy your product but those who genuinely benefit from your solution. By narrowing down your focus to a specific problem or set of problems, you simplify decisions, define clear objectives, and build credibility in one area.

Redefining your purpose lets you gain clarity on the customer experience and understand exactly what drives your target buyer. This clarity lets you streamline your lead generation, conversion, fulfilment, and retention processes. When you specialise in solving a defined problem, every part of the customer journey, from initial interest to loyal repeat customers, becomes clear and refined. As a result, cognitive load reduces, and your expertise grows, allowing you to deliver a solution repeatedly, efficiently, and with greater impact.

Next, delegate to build expertise. Reducing cognitive overload requires offloading tasks to others where possible. As you narrow your focus, empower your team to manage parts of the process. Delegation isn’t about giving up control but establishing a trusted system for repeated success.

And try to limit information overload, limit digital inputs to specific times each day. By creating boundaries around digital consumption, you avoid reacting to each update and focus on meaningful decisions.

Purposeful simplification as a path to lasting resilience

You create a structure that combats cognitive overload by aligning your business with a focused purpose and a clear audience. Instead of juggling every demand, you work intentionally, focusing on high-impact decisions that drive meaningful growth. This refined approach allows your brain to engage in deeper, strategic thinking, building resilience to handle future challenges.

George Parsons’ insights remind us that success isn’t just about doing more but about simplifying effectively to do better. Cognitive resilience comes from managing mental resources wisely, avoiding burnout, and creating a focused environment that builds expertise, confidence, and strength. By slimming down, business owners can regain control and clarity and, ultimately, a path to more sustainable and energised growth.

Elite Business: Beefing up the meat in Britain’s sandwich economy

Elite Business: Beefing up the meat in Britain’s sandwich economy

Written by Lindokuhle Ntombela on . Posted in Asset of Value, Creating time, Insights, Leadership, Team.

In this article, originally featured in Elite Business: Think of the economy like a sandwich, with the mid-tier businesses making up the meaty centre.

The highest nutritional value of a meat sandwich is the meat. Its high protein and minerals outweigh the high-carb content of its neighbours.

Most economies are like meat sandwiches. The UK’s economy is a sizable one, with 5.59 million businesses employing 27 million people and generating a hefty £ 4.5 trillion annual revenue.

The bottom slice of bread makes up the largest segment of business: the 5.3m sole proprietors and micro-enterprises who employ, on average, 1.6 people each. In effect, these businesses are self-created “jobs” for their owners. They also make up a significant voting population. Let’s make a tentative assumption that most of these entrepreneurs have a partner with everything to gain and lose from their economy. That means the voting power of this segment approaches a meaningful 10.6m ballot wins. Keeping them happy is a vital priority of any adept politician with eyes on Downing Street.

The top side of the sandwich sees dramatically smaller 8,000-odd companies that carry significant punch in their employment and tax contributions. With their extensive boards, NEDs, advisors, investors, c-suite executives, and deep establishment, sometimes centuries old, they carry weight in the corridors of Whitehall and feed a thriving public relations and media industry. A ‘lobbying’ budget to access the biggest customer in the land is not uncommon, nor is the understanding that your government representative today will likely be your board member tomorrow as the revolving door of politics and business swivel on the axis of shared interest.

The middle of this sandwich makes up the remaining 246,000 companies that carry the unfortunate moniker SME. Mostly privately held by growth-minded, self-funded entrepreneurs, they employ an average of 58.5 people. They don’t have the numbers to impact voting significantly, nor the budgets to invest in lobbying the government for access to opportunities or to influence policy. They also are considered by many to be “doing just fine”, implying that they are better off than the many who are not and, therefore, no resources or support should be directed their way. Yet society should pay closer attention to them.

Building a business that matures from micro to established and growing requires a growth mindset. That mindset sees the business owner continuously investing their money and time, committing to the 50 to 80-hour week commonly needed to fill the multiple roles their business demands, making them some of the most committed investors in our country. Their limited access to funding also increases their investment horizon. Building a business into a wealth-generating asset typically requires a 20 to 30-year investment horizon. It takes time and money to anchor the business within its locations, communities, suppliers, customers and employees. SMEs also face high levels of competition, given the maturity of our economy and the vested interests in this segment. Competition drives innovation, which attracts talent and funding. Focusing on SMEs across the UK is vital to levelling up and creating a fairer, more inclusive economy, which is the cornerstone of sustaining a democracy.

As an aside, my objection to SME as a descriptor of this segment is manifold. I’ve yet to meet a business owner who is joyously risking everything they have, griding out 80-hour weeks, contending with the relentless challenges posed by suppliers, customers, employees and increasingly government red tape with the intent of building a ‘small’ business. Reducing the dreams and ambitions of front-footed entrepreneurs is offensive and condescending. Governments and corporations that refer to this segment ought to think about changing their language to change their behaviour and find resonance and relevance to this segment, whether they be clients or a voting segment of society.

Building, amplifying and accelerating the nutritional value of the meat in the sandwich to deliver these outcomes is critical to unlocking a thriving economy that puts Britain back in a leading position in the global economy. Let’s back these businesses with fervour and enlightened self-interest.

What does being a ‘leading business’ in your industry mean?

Elite Business: What does being a ‘leading business’ in your industry mean?

Written by Lindokuhle Ntombela on . Posted in Asset of Value, Creating time, Insights, Leadership, Team.

In this article, originally featured in Elite Business: Like a health-check for humans, a business health check aligns you and your team to drive towards a common destination.

Achieving industry leadership is not trivial in the business world. Yet, when asked about their future ambitions, many state they want to be ‘a leading business in the industry’ or ‘the industry leader in XYZ’. Given this propensity and to not trivialise this achievement, let’s dig into what it truly means to be a leader in your industry and outline practical steps to move from a vague vision statement to a measurable and achievable business objective.

What does it mean to be a leading business?

When pressed to explain what “leading” means, business owners often struggle to provide a clear definition. Without a precise and measurable definition of leadership, this goal can become an empty claim, communicating that your commitment to growth is thoughtless and relies on hope and prayer rather than a clearly defined intent and action plan.

The importance of clarity

A business must define leadership in its specific context to become a true industry leader. Is it about market share? If so, who constitutes the market? For example, if you manufacture luxury furniture, you need to break down what “luxury furniture” includes. Is it dining room tables, sofas, chairs, or lounges? Understanding your market and product specifics is crucial.

Setting realistic and measurable goals

Let’s say your focus is on luxury dining room tables. The first step is determining how many such tables are bought annually in your target market. If you identify that 500,000 dining room tables are sold each year in your defined geographic region, you then need to ascertain how many of these qualify as high-quality luxury items. Suppose 5,000 of these meet the high-quality standard. This gives you a tangible target to aim for.

Understanding market share

You must know your competitors and their market shares to claim industry leadership. If you have ten competitors and the market is evenly split, each would sell about 500 tables annually. If your goal is to be the leading supplier, you must sell more than 500 tables annually. By consistently increasing your sales figures—say from 500 to 600 to 1,000 to 1,500—you can objectively measure your progress towards market leadership.

Enhancing business operations

Achieving and maintaining a leading position requires continuous improvement in various aspects of your business. This includes enhancing your products’ quality, price, service, delivery, durability, and brand reputation. By systematically improving these areas, you can increase your market share and solidify your status as an industry leader.

Claiming to be the leading business in your industry is more than just a statement—it requires a clear, measurable, and achievable plan. By defining what leadership means in your specific context, understanding your market, setting realistic goals, and continually improving your business operations, you can become a true leader in your industry.

I give a quick overview of this idea in a 2m 23s video.

Lead in uncertainty by setting and selling your business destination!

Elite Business: Lead in uncertainty by setting and selling your business destination!

Written by Lindokuhle Ntombela on . Posted in Asset of Value, Creating time, Insights, Leadership, Team.

In this article, originally featured in Elite Business: Like a health-check for humans, a business health check aligns you and your team to drive towards a common destination.

In the face of uncertainty, the key to maintaining sanity and effectiveness as well as securing a meaningful return on your time and attention is to anchor on something within your control; that is measurable, and communicable. But what should this anchor be?

As a business owner and leader, you are a servant to your business. Serving it means catering to what it needs to thrive. Consider this: when you go for a medical check-up, after a few prods, plugs, needles, and readings, a physician qualifies you as healthy. A health check-up assesses overall health, identifies potential issues early, and allows for discussion of health concerns with a doctor.

This comprehensive assessment includes a review of personal and family medical history, lifestyle, and symptoms to identify risk factors; a physical examination checking vital signs and various body parts; blood tests to measure important biomarkers; recommended screening tests based on age, sex, and risk factors; and imaging tests if needed. The check-up concludes with lifestyle and wellness counselling on diet, exercise, and other health factors.

To conduct a health check on your business, you need an ideal “state of health” measure – something simple, accessible, and clean that considers the holistic well-being of the business. For instance, having a good heart rate but a poor liver does not equate to good health.

Company valuation is a comprehensive health check for your business. It considers the business and its context and is driven by five primary levers:

Positioning

What makes your business stand out in a competitive, noisy industry?

System of delivery 

How do you find new customers, engage them, onboard them, fulfil your promises, and retain them using business systems, processes, and activities?

Purposeful team

How do you get the right people to do the right thing at the right time?

Growth 

How do you grow revenue, profit, and profitability?

Value

How do you navigate your business and direct your team toward a clearly defined destination using your positioning as a blueprint to design and institute your system of delivery to guide and empower your team’s performance that generates growth?

These levers span your entire business and industry. They are all equally measurable, making your company valuation the most comprehensive yet straightforward health indicator.

How you communicate this idea to your team is crucial. Revenues are driven by the quantity and value of products and services you sell and deliver. Connecting the quantity of products or services to your company valuation offers a more accessible and inclusive understanding of your company’s health check. Instead of using a £50 million company valuation as a destination, use the language of the business that everyone understands – make 500 cars, deliver 150 projects, or sell 3,000 subscriptions in the year of measure.

This inclusive language gets everyone on board and helps them understand where you are heading. Next, confirm why it matters. If your business purpose is well-defined and your business’s impact on the lives of customers, suppliers, the environment, and society is clear, doing more becomes almost a responsibility.

Finally, relate it to “what’s in it for me” for your team. A growing business secures work, employment, and advancement for those willing to earn it. Everybody wins.

Be bold. Be brave. Pick a sizeable number. Set a timeline. Lead.

Elite Business: Optimising business decisions: The power of focused strategy

Elite Business: Optimising business decisions: The power of focused strategy

Written by Lindokuhle Ntombela on . Posted in Asset of Value, Creating time, Innovation, Insights, Mindset, Positioning, Team, Trends.

In this article, originally featured in Elite Business: Maximise your time and attention with a framework that simplifies the complexity and noise of day-to day- business

Recently, I had the privilege of addressing a substantial audience of around 680 individuals, comprising government officials, corporate executives, private business owners, and numerous employees. The topic I presented, which resonated with many, revolved around an idea first introduced in 1956 by George Miller: the magical number seven. Miller proposed that our short-term memory can handle seven items, give or take two. Some can manage five, while others can juggle nine.

This concept made me ponder the complexities faced by business owners today. With the growing uncertainties in technology, employment, supply chains, and politics, decision-making has become increasingly challenging. The key to navigating these complexities lies in avoiding cognitive overload—an impediment caused by an excess of information that hinders clear decision-making.

The M.O.S.T. Framework for Effective Business Strategy

The essence of my talk focused on maximizing time and attention through the M.O.S.T.E framework, which stands for Mindset, Objective, Strategy, Tactics and of course, Execution. Here’s a breakdown:

Mindset 

A winning mindset is crucial. This goes beyond merely having a growth mindset; it’s about maintaining a vision that transcends the current moment. Such a mindset equips you to tackle present challenges with an eye on future success.

Objective

The power of one objective cannot be overstated. Studies indicate that having more than one primary objective can reduce your intellectual capacity by 38%. In business, this objective should focus on increasing your asset value. This singular focus ensures clarity and enhances productivity.

Strategy 

Your strategy should be singular and concentrated on building your business into a valuable asset. A successful strategy encompasses three main attributes:

  • Income Generation: Ensure your business consistently generates revenue.
  • Capital Value Improvement: Continuously work on increasing the value of your business.
  • Tradability: Develop your business to be an asset that can be sold or traded independently of your direct involvement.

Tactics 

Developing effective tactics is the next step. Here are five essential tactics to consider:

  • Positioning: Stand out from competitors by focusing on whom you serve and how you serve them uniquely.
  • System of Delivery: Develop systems that are teachable and trainable, allowing your team to manage operations efficiently.
  • Purposeful Team: Assemble a team capable of running these systems, freeing you to focus on growth.
  • Growth: Constant growth is vital. It attracts the right team members, customers, and maintains supplier enthusiasm.
  • Value: Always concentrate on transforming your business into an asset, ensuring it’s not merely a complex job but a thriving enterprise.

Execution

This is where all great efforts live or die. Too often we find ourselves stuck in the daily, weekly, monthly operational grind needed to sustain our businesses. Adopting an approach to get you our of the engine room and onto the bridge of your ship by way of an analogy, places you in a position to lead execution.

By adhering to these principles, you can simplify decision-making processes, enhance business efficiency, and ultimately build a more robust, valuable enterprise. I hope these insights prove beneficial. Until next week, cut out the noise of competing narratives around our politics, inflation, Brexit, national service, climate change and so on, to focus on what you can control and build.

Elite Business: Converting the talent you hire into company value

Elite Business: Converting the talent you hire into company value

Written by Lindokuhle Ntombela on . Posted in Asset of Value, Creating time, Insights, Leadership, Team.

In this article, originally featured in Elite Business: In a skills crisis, how can we find, train and retain talent, ensuring their contribution builds the business, not just their careers

To build your business into an Asset of Value that will generate income today and capital tomorrow, you need to build a team. Unless you have a purposeful team on board, you are up the creek without a paddle. Or rather, paddle you will, 24/7/365, which means you have a job. 

In 2023, British businesses advertised upwards of 1.4m jobs. Put differently, businesses needed to fill almost 1.5m job vacancies to sustain and grow their companies. Without people, you cannot grow and sometimes sustain what you have worked so hard to build. Yet our country barely released 400,000 people into our working economy. We have a skills and labour crisis, and it’s driving several outcomes that are likely to stay, including inflation, upward delegation, slow/stuck/regressive growth and disillusionment. Plucky politicians, including our current PM, dodge the issue, for which all sensible resolutions would be politically fraught and risk an uproar from vested Brexit interest, tax legislators, anti-globalists, and nationalists. The current rhetoric is that A.I. will plug the gaps. It’s a useful position where everyone slings the acronym around as a catch-all to sound smart, activate investment interest, and even win over new friends and contacts. It’s of no value right now when you are trying to build a team to take on the daily, weekly, and monthly operational activities that anchor you in the daily operational grind of sustaining your business, never mind growing it. You need people and talent to get going and growing.

This invites a conundrum. How do we source, win, and onboard talent where business owners and employers must gain equally from the relationship? 

Talent invites several risks, including competition to afford their hefty salaries, attitude and arrogance once talent is onboarded after the hard sell of winning their favour, and vulnerability when talent delivers value and holds you ransom. Of course, the risk of expensive talent failing to deliver is also ever-present and all too common.

If your intent remains building an Asset of Value, ensuring that you translate talent’s value into company value is vital. The greatest, unmeasured cost I’ve seen across business is the cost of winning talent and receiving value from it when the talent vacates takes the value with it. It is a horrible failure in leadership, too, and a mistake that should only ever be made once. Watch the session below to appreciate the true cost a business owner faces after 20 months of investing in unmeasured and unmanaged talent.

There are several approaches to guarding against this cost.

Should building an Asset of Value be your objective? Once you are clear on your company’s purpose, bring it to life by first creating a system of delivery. This requires you to translate your desired customer experience into sequential, measurable activities that can be taught, delegated and remunerated, including how you market, sell, deliver, service and administer customers. Once done, the value lies in your company. Alternatively, hiring talent to create this consistent client experience means that the value of that experience lies with your talent unless you can ‘decode’ your talent into a system that can be shared, used and taught to other team members. Grinding out the former option takes longer but is more sustainable and valuable. It’s also more affordable and ensures your time and attention invested in getting it right remains your company’s IP.

Perhaps winning the war for talent is less about the scarcity of able, capable employees and more about adopting a different approach to how you lead, build, and capitalise your company. Wear both hats: that of an operator who can build solutions to win customers and hold them through a consistent, dependable customer experience and that of an investor who ensures that all your investments in human talent translate into value that vests in your company.

Elite Business: The six phases of business leadership to deliver your legacy

Elite Business: The six phases of business leadership to deliver your legacy

Written by Lindokuhle Ntombela on . Posted in Featured, Insights, Leadership, Mindset.

In this article, originally featured in Elite Business: To create wealth as a business owner, you need to change how and what you lead over time.

Wealth creation is a strategy, not luck. As a business owner, embracing change is vital to remain relevant, grow, and win in a noisy and competitive market. It’s essential to wealth creation.

Across your lifespan as a business owner, how you lead your business determines your wealth creation outcome. As your company grows, how you lead and direct it must change to ensure it becomes your greatest wealth-generating asset. 

Using a framework against which to know when and how to change the way you lead a business is helpful. I’ve noticed six distinct shifts in leadership attention and direction that enable the likelihood that your business and career generate wealth and a legacy.

Positioning growth leadership

This is about understanding what business you are in defined not by your product or service but by who you serve, what problem your product or service solves for them and what the ideal engagement experience would be to favour your business above competitors. When you start, it’s about serving anyone and everyone in your industry. It ends when you can prioritise less than a handful of segments you want to dominate in the future. This engagement experience includes how to market, sell, fulfill and retain your customers and forms the blueprint of your business model.

Organic growth leadership

Once we know what business we are in and who our customer segments are, the next phase of leadership centres on scaling your customer engagement and fulfilment system using the blueprint. Put differently, it is about building commercial processes and systems, which you can delegate to a team that will create a reliable, consistent customer experience. Getting this right is vital to release your time from daily operations to deliver the next phase of leadership growth.

Accelerated growth leadership

At this point, at least 70% of your attention should focus on accelerating your growth to dominate your segments by deepening your market share of the segments you have chosen to dominate. For example, if a furniture manufacturer decides to dominate the SOHO segment, calculate its approximate value and ensure you develop and enable market access strategies, campaigns and relationships that deepen your market share.

Next-level growth leadership

As you deepen your share of the segment you’ve defined your business against, the next phase of leadership is about de-risking your exposure to that segment and deepening your profitability. In my book, Sweat-Scale-Sell, I highlight the trickiness of this phase of leadership through the story of Jack the Baker. 

Having positioned his business to solve the requirement of 365-fresh-baked-goods for continental breakfast to hotels, he created the ideal experience with his team to dominate this segment in the hospitality industry. His next-level growth play saw him translate the same proposition into the supermarket segment across food retail to solve the problem of morning trade. 

It brought in a new source of revenue that could be serviced off his scalable fulfilment platform, necessitating only a moderate cost increase. The “yawn” between revenue and costs dropped down to the bottom line and a significant shift in profitability. The key to next-level growth is that leveraging your fulfilment platform solves the same problem. It was and remains the blueprint against which his brand, commercial system and team had become expert at delivering. 

Capital growth leadership

This phase ensures you lock in your business value for a successful capital exit. From start to exit, over a 20–30-year period, a business built and led against the above framework should achieve a capital exit above £50m. 

Yes, it is possible, and you can do it. I’ve seen this year in and out across the UK, USA and EU companies. Retiring in the sun by the sea is for the birds, bringing us to the final phase of leadership.  

Legacy growth leadership

The opportunity to create a Family Office to house the capital gained from an exit is worth considering. Set aside a portion of the funds within your Family Office to invest in a few early-stage companies within the industry in which you have successfully built your now-former business. You will have the network and relationships to spot young winners who benefit from your knowledge, insight, relationships, and mentorship. Investing in them can keep you in the game at a strategic level, not a daily grind, and allow you to remain relevant and enjoy a life of purpose and meaning. 

Wealth has three elements: Make money, the first 2 phases; Grow money – the subsequent 2 phases. And Protect money, the last 2 phases. Having a plan to make it happen is as important as enacting it. It will set you apart from the 94.6% of businesses started that ultimately close. It will also let you continue serving humankind, arguably a key to a rich, fulfilling and contended life.