If You Truly Want To Grow Your Company, Follow These Five Critical Steps
I'll tell you flat out that unless you want to grow, it's just not going to happen. Then you have to ask yourself how fast you want to grow. Once you have answered those basic questions and determined first that, yes, you want to grow, and second, that you want to grow rapidly, I believe there are a few basic practices you can adopt to set you on the right course.
To me, there are five critical steps you must take to set your company on a path to rapid growth.
Step one is to decide if you want to grow rapidly in a highly specialized way or if you prefer to be more of a generalist. If you look at the CRN 2006 Fast Growth 100 ranking, there are companies that fall into both camps. If specialization is your preferred model, then you must decide if you will specialize by vertical market or technology.
If vertical is your answer, then your chances for success increase if you pick a rapidly growing vertical such as health care. Recent studies indicate that most of the new job creation in this country surrounds health care, so it stands to reason that servicing that vertical will offer a wealth of growth opportunity for IT solution providers.
Step two is getting the right people. This, of course, can be a chicken-or-egg discussion. I happen to believe you need chickens before you can produce eggs. The chickens, in this case, are your sales team. You need people with solid sales expertise who can go out and peck around until they find some business for your technical talent to deliver on.
If you hire talented salespeople and put them in charge of driving growth by building a compensation program that demands it, you will find yourself some business. So, step two is to get some chickens that can let the world know you have plenty of eggs to sell.
Step three requires you to increase your partnering skills because no one company can do it all. If you are reluctant to partner, you will have to say no to some business opportunities because of lack of skills or bandwidth. The understanding that a partner can provide technical expertise you don't have means you can take on more than you would have been able to previously without partnering. You may not make as much as you do when you deliver the entire project, but the ability to deliver more of the solution means more business and more growth.
Step four is to deliver the right products. Here's where some of you will disagree with me, but it's more important to deliver the best product for the customer than it is to dedicate yourself to a single vendor and only deliver what it has to offer. The fastest-growing companies are generally those that are the most flexible throughout their organization, and you can't be as flexible with a single-product-line mind-set.
Step five is to commit to helping solve any problem your customer throws at you. ACS Services, No. 75 on the 2006 Fast Growth 100 list, received a call during the conference last week from a customer that was told by the electric company it was going to shut off the power for an eight-hour period to do some repair work. The panicked customer didn't know what to do. While ACS doesn't deal in power generation, it arranged for the rental of some generators from an existing client to keep its other customer up and running during the shutdown. The end result was a satisfied customer that is bound to think of ACS first in the future.
Make something happen. I can be reached at (781) 839-1202 or via e-mail at [email protected].