Everyone wants to swim with the big fishes in business. But until you're ready to put on your big kid pants and go and play in that game, there are some big shifts your business needs to go through, and you need to go through as an entrepreneur.
In this video, I'm going to take you through some of the biggest shifts we went through. As we went from a small business into a mid-market company, I picked out five lessons that we learned along the way.
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Transcription:
Everyone wants to swim with the big fishes in business. But until you're ready to put on your big kid pants and go and play in that game, there's some big shifts your business needs to go through, and you need to go through as an entrepreneur. G'day, my name is Peter Moriarty. In this video, I'm going to take you through some of the biggest shifts we went through. As we went from a small business into a mid market company, I picked out five lessons that we learned along the way. And, you know, we kind of paved the way as our business grew up and, and became the next level. Now revenue wise, that was us going from around about $1 million in revenue to now above $5 million in the group. And obviously, we're continuing to accelerate from there. But no matter where your business is at, once you get to the stage of probably about 15 to 20 employees, you've made it through what we call the desert. And the desert is that No Man's Land of you've got a business and you've proven the model. But you've not yet got a high performing business that can scale that the CEO can step away from now in our growth roadmap, which is on our channel. And we use that as a framework for businesses going through different stages, we're talking about here exiting the growth stage and going into the scale stage. And the scale stage is really the point where the founder of the business can step away, potentially bring in a professional CEO, and allow that business to thrive. And that's what I did around that time, I brought on Scott gladly who actually helped to write this video. And he assisted me first as a general manager, but eventually took over the role of CEO, because it was my time as a founder to step back and allow someone to manage the day to day growth of the business. But for me to actually step back and focus more on the strategy, the brand and the culture, and allow the day to day to be taken care of by Scott. So let's talk about the journey from small businesses to mid market. This is paved with some struggles, some challenges, but with patience and persistence, it is going to pay off for you in the end, the first thing to get right is excellent people and excellent quality systems as well, you need to have an equal balance of great people on your team, but also great systems that are backing up those people. And it's effectively not enough to rely on just having excellent people holding and pulling up the slack. Now, what I mean by that is, if you imagine when you're growing in the early stages of your business, you're going to need team members that are quite entrepreneurial, and quite versatile. You want people that you can throw a challenge or throw a problem at and they're going to be able to pick up the pieces and run with it pretty easily. But as you grow, if you have too many of those kinds of people in the one room, well, then you can see what starts to happen there. Right, you've got lots of people who are great at creating new systems and doing things a new way. But they're either going to get bored or they're gonna get demotivated or they're going to start, you know, jumping on top of each other with thinking their ideas better than the others, and not really getting along well as the business needs to grow and scale. As a business matures, you need to have a I wouldn't call them B players, that's probably not the right terminology. But you need to have those who can be more consistent in the way that they deliver work, where you have those who are good at creating systems and starting work and doing things new and differently, to be more in the leadership positions for your business. Now, we want to have, as always in business, a symbiosis between people, technology and processes and having those all coming together. And what that means is is that in your leaders and those that are actually creating the systems, that's where you want their creative energy and input to go to creating great systems. And then you have performance that can come in and run the systems as well as those who can create the systems. Point number two should seem completely obvious. And that is that culture is king. Notwithstanding point number one, it's, you know, very much people are your most important asset. But in terms of the structure of your business, and how those people are actually contained within a framework that works. Making sure that you have culture on point helps you to build a high performing team that is going to help you have the most high performing business. Now, culture is one of those words where people are like, Oh, do we have enough beanbags? You know, do we have fresh hot meals cooked for people like Facebook does? No, no, that's not how I think about it. When you connect a business to mission, vision and values, and you all agree on, you know, what is the fabric that holds together those that you want to attract to the business, both as team members, but also as customers as well, really knowing and understanding what you stand for as a business and what you stand for as a team, who is the tribe that you want to you know, attract, both in the marketplace, but also internally inside the business. When you're clear on all of those things. Well, you're going to act a little bit more like a closely knit team, rather than just a collection of strangers strung together by systems and procedures. Now for many businesses that are fast growth and for many businesses that we see are successful in the businesses that we work with. They have a big focus on culture, you would have seen in Silicon Valley with the startups and all of the technology companies that have run in the last 20 years. culture is so important for connecting teams and getting great results. Remember that great culture attracts great talent. And what that means is that you're going to be more likely to bring great people into the business. Now, these days, you can't get away with having bad culture in your business. There are websites like Glassdoor, which will give you a public ranking, and a public review score of what it's like to actually work inside your business. Now, that can be something that hurts your business, or it could be something that can be used as an advantage to actually attract the right kind of talent to your high performing team in a small business, you may be able to get away with having personal relationships with every single person in the business, particularly if you've got less than 15 staff and your business. But as you grow and scale and you get north of 20 people in the organization, you're not going to be able to have personal relationships with every single person in the company. Now, you may be able to manage four or five people directly yourself whether or not you're actually formally involved in the business as a operational executive. But once you get to the point where you're hiring people that you don't even meet, or the only way to connect with them is through culture. Number three is about instinct. And instinct is not just enough, you need to really bring in the facts. Now with a small business, typically, business owners will be able to rely on gut feel, they'll be able to kind of use instinct and intuition. And that's really useful for working out what's the best business model is the market responding to something and you want to be able to adapt and move quickly. And so that skill of being able to move the business on a bit of a whim of what you're thinking or feeling more likely in how the business needs to adapt or respond to a market, you know, market instinct and a market reality? Well, that doesn't quite work as you go into the scale stage and become a mid market company, when you have more staff that you can manage. And when you have larger operation that you can keep your finger on the pulse yourself, you need to start to implement things like strict KPIs which actually measure what's going on in the business. And we've got other videos on the channel about making KPIs and also visualizing your KPIs as well. It's very important for you to also get data not just on your internal team, but externally as well. And what I mean by that is tracking, what is your customer experience? How are you actually delivering to your customers, it's not good enough to wait until you get a poor Google review, on the back end of a bad customer experience, when you could have prevented it earlier, by giving your customers opportunity to give feedback during the course of you're delivering some kind of service to them. And whether that's delivering a product, whether it's delivering customer service, whether that's, you know, doing a project or selling them a widget, you want to make sure that you've got opportunity for your customers to give feedback. And that needs to be facts and data based now not to say that you wouldn't still use your intuition and your gut feeling. But it's very important to make sure that you're getting correct numbers coming into the business, so you can make database decisions. Now, why database decisions so important? Well, because when you're not seeing everything in the business, this is going to help you roll up information. So you can receive enough information to act and an executive level. But also, as you grow to a larger business, the stakes become higher. I've heard a number of eight figure business owners say that they wish they had a seven figure business because when you make a mistake in an eight figure business, it's potentially going to cost you hundreds of 1000s of dollars, if not potentially millions of dollars. Whereas when you make a mistake in a seven figure business, it might cost you 10s of 1000s of dollars, or maybe a hundreds of 1000s of dollars if it's really bad. And so making sure that you have the correct data means that you can keep your eye on the ball. And your small problems don't turn into big problems when someone doesn't have their eye on the ball on the gut feel of what's going on. Tip number four is security matters. As your team grows, you increase the risk of potential security breaches. And it's an uncomfortable topic to talk about sometimes, but from time to time, you're going to have staff that underperform you may have staff that are just not doing their jobs correctly, you may have even have the potential for a security breach of some sort, when you have more and more team members growing and scaling, particularly if you're growing quickly. And if you don't have a dedicated internal technology department inside your business, well, you're opening yourself up to risk as you have more complications added to your technology stack. And there's more opportunities for things to go wrong. If you happen to be based in Australia, and you're over $2 million a year in revenue, or there's additional stringent privacy protections which apply to your business similar to if you're in finance or healthcare or in the legal industry. And you may be subject to Australian Privacy Principles law, which mean that if for example, customer data was leaked by someone accidentally sharing a Google spreadsheet with someone outside your business, there's really heavily heavy penalties for business owners and directors who are involved in their business. And those breaches need to formally be notified to the information ombudsman. And so you can run into real trouble with your business if you don't take your security seriously. Now, thankfully, you can do that pretty easily using Google workspace and we've got plenty of resources on increasing your security for Your business. If you'd like some help with that, please feel free to reach out. But it's very important for you to make sure that you're protecting your brand reputation and your business reputation by taking the security and especially the technology security of your business seriously. Now, you may be thinking, yeah, Peter, but I've got any virus installed. And you know, we've just always been pretty safe with security. And I've got two factor authentication enabled on my account. So I feel pretty good about that. The thing that shifts as you grow as a into a larger business, is that you start to become a target for some organizations, they can tell that you are a business that has more staff, because they can look you up on LinkedIn. And they then know that well, there's probably more money flowing through your accounts. And one of the very popular Hacks is someone mimicking your emails and sending you an email message pretending to be your CFO, with bank details of a transfer that needs to be done today, it's always urgent, and then you sending money to someone with that account, then being cleared out and sent overseas. This is a very common issue with a very simple fix. And if you haven't already watched our DNS video, well, that'll teach you how to fix that inside workspace. Number five is it's all about the brand. A small business can survive on relationships, the relationships between you and your team, the relationships between you and your customers, as the founder or the business owner, your personality is probably going to be intrinsically linked to the brand. And you're probably the person who's magnetically drawing people in to doing business with you. But as a mid market company, you're going to be treated by your customers like a big brand. And what that means is that you need to start acting like a big brand. Your brand is not just your logo, it's a combination of what your promises, what your product is your systems, your data, your culture, basically how well you deliver on everything that you promise. And it's important for you to protect those things because you are going to be appearing in the market alongside competitors, probably as a key player, if you've reached the breach of small business, and you're growing into a mid market company, where you're probably starting to reach some significance in your industry, and people will know you, they will know of you because they will have seen you around if you're starting to become significant in your area or your marketplace of business. And that's where brand is important to know and we think about but also protect as well. I hope you enjoyed this video and good luck on growing from small business land into the mid market, it's a bit of a daunting task. But as your business grows and develops, I can tell you, there's an amazing Utopia on the other side of the scale business where the founder or the business owner gets to take a step back and focus on the strategic work that probably brought you into business in the first place. Being able to be an entrepreneur, run a successful business, have time on your hands, and also create great impact in the world as well. Now, times are changing and the world is changing and we need to adapt as businesses, we need to improve ourselves. And we need to improve our team's work as well and our team's work life as well. There is so much now changing in our ever changing world and post pandemic. Well, we've got a pretty interesting business time ahead. As we're moving to more flexible work right across the board. We've shared as much as possible here. And if you're interested in learning more, check out the other videos on our channel, we've got an amazing growth roadmap, which helps you learn what stages of technology implementation are required at each stage of business. And if you're moving into the mid market, well, you probably want to check out the growth playlist and also the scale playlist as well. That's going to really help you get on page with what you need to be doing in terms of your technology systems to make sure things are working. Now if you're already a customer of Google workspace, we've got a pretty amazing offer to work with us. It's absolutely free, you can click on the button below to do a transfer into us, which gets you access to a bunch of free goodies and potentially off market discounts that are not available to the public. But if you are an organization and you're looking for some support with your tech stack and you want to maybe do a bit of a review, well, you can click on to a consultation down below, submit a consultation request. If you qualify. Our team will be in touch to connect you we work with businesses all over the world from one to two man bands right up to organizations with hundreds or even 1000s of employees and so if you want some help with tech and your workspace drop in a link below, and if you are not already subscribed, hit that subscribe button. Give us a thumbs up if you liked the content. If you've got any questions, drop them down below and I'll do my best to answer until next time. See you later.
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