In a previous post titled What is Your Business Growth Stage? , I discussed 5 stages and 8 factors influencing business growth. This is based on extensive research and two decades of experiencing them in action.
Understand these factors are consistent. They don’t change in each of the 5 stages of business growth, however the way you approach them DOES change depending on your stage of growth. So, knowing your business growth stage is critical to growing your business.
To help, I developed a self-assessment form for my book Business Growth Simplified. It helps you determine your business growth stage, and you can download a self-assessment by clicking the cover image.
To make the factors easier to understand, they are divided into two groups – leadership and management. Let’s take a closer look at what really influences the growth of your business.
4 Leadership Factors
The leadership factors focus on the people at the top. In a small business that the owner(s). So, we often find business being held back by the owner and not the potential of the business itself.
I wrote posts in the past on the topic of self-knowledge and humility as critical to business growth. This is why these are important topics. The owner’s state of mind and skills enormously impacts a business’ ability to grow. As a result, many of my coaching and consulting engagement become one of psychotherapy as we try to help the owner get past his/her mental obstacles.
Let’s review the 4 leadership factors:
Owner Goals — how the owner has decided to use the business as an asset that supports their personal dream.
Operational Skills — how well the owner understands what the business does to generate revenue.
Managerial Abilities — how well the owner understands how to direct and manage towards achieving his/her own goals for the business.
Strategic Thinking — how well the owner understands outside influences and applying their knowledge to react to opportunities and threats to maximize return on the investment.
4 Management Factors
The management factors are a little easier to grasp. This is because they are the things we normally associate with business growth.
However, notice you don’t see marketing and sales as part of the eight factors. That is because these are business functions. Business functions are part of a business whether its growing or not. The factors listed here actually cut across every business function. So, if you master these areas you can get them under control in every function of your business.
Let’s review the 4 management factors:
Financial Assets — the money-related resources necessary to achieve your business goals.
Personnel Resources — the team necessary to achieve your business goals.
Systems — the processes, procedures, and technologies used to achieve your business goals.
Business Assets — those tangible and intangible things that a business both owns and that give value to the business, such as equipment, facilities, customer lists, intellectual property, and so on.
Take a deeper dive into this topic by watching my Facebook LIVE broadcast on the eight factors. This may help you better understand the purpose of each of the 8 factors.
Growth Requires More Than Just Working on Your Business
As you can see, there is much more at work here than just making sure the business is operating. The biggest thing that jumped out at me from Churchill and Lewis’ research is they actually found a correlation between business growth and an owner’s skills and abilities (leadership).
I had only observed the leadership dynamic at work in client businesses years before finding the Harvard Business Review articles. In fact, I felt the leadership dynamic was a bigger influence than the management dynamic. Churchill and Lewis just gave me the third-party research credibility to my experience and opinion. Now it’s not opinion it became fact!
My book Business Growth Simplified shows how to apply address the eight business growth factors to your situation. If you then apply this newfound knowledge it will have a positive impact on your business growth.
Find Your Business Growth Stage
So, there you have it. The power of the leadership and management as business growth factors. Most often the reason that a business stagnates is because the owner has reached his or her skill limits and self-knowledge, but you can keep growing, by learning and applying the aspects of leadership and management that matter most for your business’ next stage of growth.
What you need to do relevant to the 8 factors is dependent on business growth stage. To assess your stage click the button below to download your FREE Business Growth Stage Self-Assessment.
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Great post! These are really useful ideas!
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Great post about “Business Growth”. I have recently started my new business and looking for some informative and useful content to grow my business. Right now I don’t have my own team so, I am planning to outsource some of my tasks, as I have heard that outsourcing is great for startups also help a business to grow. What do you think about this?
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These days, it is a higher priority than any time in recent memory for organizations to have an all-around oiled promoting machine. The explanation is basic: to make due and flourish in the present cutthroat commercial center, organizations need clients. Also, to get clients, organizations need to successfully showcase their items and administrations.
https://vibez365.com/the-marketing-process-involves-eight-major-business-functions/
Mikki,
While I agree with your premise and the information you shared here is great, what piece a business owner would apply is really more dependent on what I offered here. Which aspects of the marketing function use is completely dependent on the current growth stage of the business. Additionally, it depends on where the current operation has chokepoints in the revenue engine. If you have a chokepoint in sales or operation and try to do more marketing, then you’ll create an even bigger problem. So, it’s critically to understand where you need to put your focus before haphazardly applying the latest thing you read. We teach business owners how to do manage like this with our Business Accelerator Masterclass.