All businesses move through different stages of growth and the focus required in one cycle will likely change in the next cycle. Your advisory board members must be able to support your leadership team through all these various growth stages.
Active Knowledge Question:
What growth cycle is your business moving into and what focus will that require to be successfully achieved?
Last week we spoke of the need to choose the right advisory board members for the right reasons with the right skills. Those skills will change as a business grows and the focus of the advisory board and its members will need to shift with each transition of growth. If they don’t you may effectively get stuck and the business will cease to really grow.
As you shift into succession and introduce new leadership members to the team, you must clearly identify where they will be in the growth cycle. This will help you to correctly recruit and focus your advisory board members on the next challenge.
Businesses typically follow a growth cycle similar to that depicted below. Each of the early steps represents growth in the size and complexity of the business. The later steps reflect the challenges of a successful business that fails to evolve. Any business will typically cycle through this pattern many times during any leadership team’s term, especially in family-owned businesses where leaders may have tenure for a generation.
Here is a quick list of how the needs of a business may vary over different stages of its life cycle:
- Inception (sounding board).
- Just born (growth).
- Walking and talking (cash flow).
- Establishing identity (focusing on what they are best at).
- Developing self (systems and processes).
- Testing the limits (control and direction).
- Mature and settled (reduction in costs and bureaucracy).
- Opportunity (a desire to change).
- Maybe too settled (renewal).
- Really settled (mavericks).
- Slowing down (new management).
In succession the needs and life cycle stages may vary as you explore different options to grow and transition the business to the next generation, for example you may:
- Decide to fund a new family member to commence a new business as a way to test their entrepreneurial spirit.
- Choose to appoint a family member to lead an existing part of the business that is not performing well to develop their business acumen and leadership skills.
- Take your existing business and allocate various business units to various family members for them to manage individually.
The options for growth are almost endless and the support needs of the new leaders under each option will vary. Not only on who they are and their capabilities but also the growth stage of each business.
In every instance, your advisory board must possess the right skills to ensure success.
An entirely new level of performance.
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All the best in the success of your business,
Richard Shrapnel
