The Small Business Growth Matrix was launched more than a year ago. Since then I have written many posts about small business growth. If you’ve been following, I hope you have learned a lot. In applying the model day-to-day to clients, I too have learned a lot. I have learned enough so I can boil down the essence of Churchill and Lewis’ small business growth model to a few very powerful components.
The Small Business Growth Stage is Set:
First and foremost you must understand at what stage is your small business growth. If you don’t know from where you’re starting, it’s difficult to chart a course for success. The post in the previous link will give you an excellent overview of the stages of the growth cycle. If you are honest in evaluating yourself against the model, it will be easy to determine your business growth stage.
With your stage defined, use the Small Business Growth Matrix to define your objectives to successfully navigate the next stage of business growth. The tools and services we offer at DE, Inc. help you accomplish what you need along the way to achieve small business growth!
Contributing Factors to Small Business Growth
The next components in the growth model are addressing the two key factors contributing to successful growth. Churchill & Lewis’ research found that owner ability and company systems have a significant influence on a business ability to grow.
While this may seem pretty obvious, know which owner company factors to address and at what stage is the “secret sauce.” Again the reason I develop the Growth Matrix. It provides the receipt with exactly where you need to focus on owner factors and company factors as you make your way along the growth cycle. Let’s take a little closer look at what makes up these critical two areas.
Leadership = Owner Factors Contributing to Small Business Growth
Churchill and Lewis found 4 sets of skills that an owner needed or needed to address through the right team members were necessary at every stage. These are as follow:
- Owner Goals
- Operational Abilities
- Managerial Abilities
- Strategic Abilities
As I looked at the owner factors it became apparent that leadership was what they were addressing. Leadership is the ability to motivate others toward a desired outcome. If you can create a vision (desired outcome) or delegate the action to accomplish the goal (motivate others) it’ll be a hard road to hoe.
My previous post 10 Leadership Tips We All Can Learn From a Boy Scout is a quick read on what skills makes up a good leader. Which of these competencies have you mastered? Which ones do you need to need to work on? This might be a good place to apply an executive coach.
Management = Company Factors Contributing to Small Business Growth
The 4 company factors that Churchill and Lewis found were critical to business growth are:
- Financial Resources
- Personnel Resources
- System Resources
- Business Resources
The focus here is all about scalability! Most small business owners are very talented in creating success. Where they frequently fall short is turning their success into systematic approaches that can then be taught to others.
Each stage of growth will pose a new set of challenges in each of these management areas. Mastering each systematically allows an owner to delegate pieces of the business to others. This allows the owner to begin focusing on the next growth objective to achieve the next stage of the small business growth model.
Successfully Achieving Small Business Growth
With the foundation laid here you just need a little better explanation of where to focus depending on your current stage of business growth. In the coming weeks and month this will be the focus of the posts. They will provide you with the areas of focus stage-by-stage. Future posts will look in more depth on management and leadership challenges at each stage and provide tools and techniques to help you meet the challenge. You can subscribe to our newsletter to receive more of this information.
While some of this material already exists on this blog in various forms. I felt that a more structured form would allow readers to more quickly find what they were searching and where to get the help they needed in order to face the challenges that they face on a daily basis in their own business.
Master the skills necessary to address the challenges along the way and entrepreneurship is your reward! Are you up to the challenge?
About Dino Eliadis
[...] where is all this “leadership talk” headed? In the post Small Business Growth Simplified I reintroduced Churchill and Lewis’ small business growth model. In it they describe how 2 sets [...]