Article for the week of May 9, 2008
CEOs – Is Your Team Stopping Your Growth?
by Paul DiModica
Growth may be your company goal, objective or hope. But, do you have the right management team to take your company to the next level? Are your executives learning on the job or are they educated in growth strategies and tactics.
In 1970, Dr. Laurence Peters wrote a seminal book called The Peter Principal. In the book, he describes how management teams often promote company employees above their level of competency into new positions and ultimately cause them to fail.
- Has your firm ever promoted a great salesperson into sales management so it would not lose the revenue that person generated?
- Has your management team ever hired or promoted a marketing person into an executive position because they were personable, well liked by their peers and created great looking brochures?
- Has your firm ever recruited a corporate manager from a competitor (which you continually lost business to) just because that person became available -- and your firm believed that it just needed to hire a "player" on its team?
Just because a salesperson hits their assigned sales quota does not mean he or she is going to be a good sales manager. Just because your brochures are pretty does not mean that your marketing manager understands how to do market gap analysis and market research correctly to help direct your company’s future.
When growing your company in both recessionary times and non-recessionary times, there are specific action steps your firm needs to take on how to grow your revenue. These action steps must manage both internal and external growth factors that either accelerate or depress your company growth success.
Internal Business Growth Factors
- Your management team
- Your old customers
- Your employees
- Your suppliers or partners
External Business Growth Factors
- The economy
- New customers
- Government
- Competitors
Often, management looks internally to their team to help take their company to the next level. But this incestuous leadership model which uses only the company's internal knowledge set sometimes actually reduces growth potential because the team has never been where you want to go. If your team could get you to the next level, you would already be there.
The four primary Internal Growth Factors of 1) Management, 2) Old Customers 3) Employees and 4) Suppliers must all be aligned succinctly with premeditated growth steps and managed simultaneously with the External Growth Factors of 1) The Economy 2) New Customers 3) Government and 4) Competitors. To grow corporate revenues, study The Premeditated Model of Growth and manage both Internal and External Growth Factors with the right team members . . . and you will succeed.
Business growth is a company responsibility.
"The Best Corporate Leaders Never Point out The Window To Blame External Conditions; They Look In The Mirror and Say 'We are Responsible for our Results!'"
Jim Collins – Author of Good to Great
Paul R. DiModica
President
Value Forward Group
(770) 632-7647
www.valueforward.com
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