More development, less doing

Struggling to grow your business beyond a certain level? Dr Mike Ashby has advice to put you back on track. 

My company helps owners of established businesses get their business to the next level. We’ve worked alongside hundreds of owners of small to medium-sized firms in a variety of different ways over the past 11 years.

Most of them know what they want and they even have a pretty good idea of how to get there. When I’m sitting with an MD, there’s only one person in the room who really understands that business. But what I do know about is business development, and I think it’s the area of leadership and management that most small to medium businesses struggle with.

To me, business development is the process of making the business perform better, from funnel to execution and the growth of both. It’s the processes involved in generating a steady stream of qualified leads, converting them, and connecting with them in such a way that not only do they return, they also act as advocates for your business. And when I say it’s the processes, I am not referring to the tasks, the ‘doing’. I’m talking about the design of the doing – better known as management.

I’ve always liked a quote from Thomas Watson Sr, the founder of IBM. He said that IBM was successful because he had a vision of how it would look when it was finally done. And once he knew how it would look, he had a vision of how it would act when it was finally done.

Then he realised that for IBM to become a great company, it would have to act like one long before it ever became one. Every day they would measure their performance against where they were trying to get to and spend the next day trying to make up the gap. “Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business.”

The problem for most owners of even medium-sized businesses is that they lose themselves in doing business in their particular job. The demands of running the machine as it gets bigger mean that for a lot of owners, their definition of long term planning is ‘what’s for lunch’. They’ve got the business past the first hurdle, which is having a regular stream of work that comes in the door regardless of what they do – in other words, they’ve got a viable value proposition out there in the market. But getting beyond that natural flow of work requires investment and energy at two levels:

• Bringing the company to the attention of a wider pool of A-class prospects.
• Improving the capacity and capability of the organisation to cope with more demand.

The reality is that while you can and should have salespeople doing the work of sales, the MD is the person best equipped to be promoting the company, sniffing out market and customer opportunities, thinking about where the market is going and how to orient the company away from the threats and towards the opportunities in the environment.

If you are always preoccupied with making sure the machine is working, you aren’t going to be out in the market; or if you are out in the market, your head is still back at the ranch.

What’s the fix?

• A simple business plan that’s clear about where you’re trying to get to, your strategies and your goals.
• Develop the people beneath you. Grow your managers into leaders so that they run the business while you work on business development.

Simple, but hard. A lot easier just to keep running flat out and hope the market takes care of itself.