Accelerating Company Growth

Your vision is all about where you see your business in a number of years from now: how big can it be, what markets can you dominate; what products will people know you for and what will you have achieved.

By listening very carefully to your customers, you always can find a problem to solve for them or an opportunity that can be exploited

Your value proposition needs to capture, in a single sentence if possible, what the company does that is of value to your target customers.

you are stuck in a market that is no longer growing or is contracting, don’t keep plodding along in the hope that something will change or that the market will come back. Get out of it – either by moving to a new market or by redefining the market that you operate in.

I remembered back to my time when I sat in those seats dreaming about being a great entrepreneur, but also worrying about how to get there. I was nobody, with no capital, no connections and little knowledge of the world outside the college gates. As I stood there in front of this class I envied them: in this new world that we live in, there are no boundaries to what we can do and what we can achieve; the only limitations are the limitations of our imaginations and our determination to make our dreams a reality. In my time, there were so many barriers to entry such as licenses to access markets, technologies that cost too much, overseas markets that cost too much to reach, communications and information systems that were too hard to use or out of reach because of costs, etc.
I told the MBS students: “There are no limits to what you can achieve today. The world is truly at your disposal. Building a technology company is like taking a blank canvas and painting the picture that you can imagine. Making your dreams a reality has never been as easy as it is today. So go dream and make them reality.”

Some examples of the basics are:
A good accounting system with monthly management reports;
Control over invoicing and cash collections;
Company Office filings are up-to-date;
Contracts with customers all signed and filed;
HR files for all employees with contracts of employment;
Agreed staff review processes and records;
Reporting systems that show key performance indicators (KPIs) that allow you to track and manage the business;
Controls over purchasing and banking (who can authorize purchases and payments);
Share options scheme (if you have one) all documented and in place.

When you are thinking about selling your company, you should plan to be able to go 100 times faster than you are going today. In other words, if you are selling your company to a larger company, typically they are buying you to put your product or service into their existing customer base, which by definition is much larger than yours, so make sure when they come to buy you that you can show them how your company can handle 100 times more customers.

Don’t ever wait until you are nearly out of cash to raise funding and don’t rely on your existing VCs to give you great terms if you are about to run out of cash, particularly if you are not meeting your business plan that they bought into so you are running out of cash earlier than originally planned.

Every experienced entrepreneur who has been through a successful exit with VCs on board will say to you to always raise venture capital money when you least need it, assuming you can get a good value. VCs love to invest in companies that don’t need the cash to survive; they want to see their cash being used only for accelerating growth if at all possible. So the ideal company is one that is growing, making sufficient cash to continue funding itself, but could go a lot faster if more money was invested now.

Drucker, the renowned business author, argued that the organization of the future would hire only top executives. All other support services – HR, finance, operations, engineering, sales – in fact, everything below the senior management team would be outsourced to third party organizations on a pay-as-you-use model. Today, this is happening in businesses all over the world.