Business owner, do these complaints sound familiar to you? Why is productivity down? Why are margins falling when revenue is soaring? My back office just can't keep up or give me good data It seems like my technology team is always fighting fires If so, it’s likely that you are going through one of the transitional phases of the Business Storm Cycle. Whether that’s the rapid growth phase of the Tornado, where sales are suddenly [...]
Who’s more likely to survive a powerful storm: The person who prepares for what’s coming, and has a plan in place to deal with the likely outcome or the one who didn’t bother to check the weather report that day? The answer’s pretty obvious, but it’s amazing how many otherwise smart and forward-thinking individuals in leadership fail to prepare (and thus prepare to fail) for the predictable phases of the Business Storm Cycle ahead of [...]
You’re caught up in the Business Storm Cycle – and though you may not have heard its name, you’re certainly aware of its impact. Maybe you’re caught up in the Tornado, that hypergrowth phase where sales are exploding and you’re running as fast as you can to keep up. Or perhaps you’re stuck in the Avalanche, watching your margins shrink as your growth declines. Or you might be in the doldrums of the consolidation phase, [...]
It doesn’t matter if you’re in an accelerating or decelerating phase of the Business Storm Cycle; the transformation is a similar process. What you’ll find on the upper slope when you’re accelerating is that you don’t have the right applications; you have people in the wrong roles, or you don’t have enough people. On the deceleration slope, you’ll find you have redundancies. You probably have double or triple entries. You have too many people on [...]
When it comes to going through business cycles, there’s always some good news that goes along with every phase, even the ones that seem the bleakest when you’re in them. Consider the caterpillar: If someone was to tell it, “Hey, buddy, time to stop crawling around eating leaves! You have to climb inside this tiny little sack for the next few months,” that’s going to sound like pretty bad news to the caterpillar. The good [...]
When you’re coming out of that dizzying hypergrowth business phase we call the Tornado, it’s time to get things back in order. That means salvaging as much as you can that you chucked out the window, and then getting it all organized once again. Professionalization of IT often has to be re-implemented after a heavy-growth phase. It needs policies and procedures to follow and standard operating procedures. While professionalizing your team, you want to focus [...]
Your big upward rush has stalled, and somehow, despite all those sales and all the new people you’ve brought on, your margins are rapidly shrinking. How could that be? And who will shoulder the responsibility? This is when the finger pointing and frustration typically begin in the part of the business cycle I call the Avalanche. Administration—the back office—has been throwing a lot of people and a lot of money at all these symptoms. Executive [...]