I spent time this week working through the same problem with two different business owners in two totally different industries.
It’s a problem I’ve seen repeatedly in many small to mid-sized companies, including my own.
To understand the problem, first picture a baby:
This baby has a small body and small legs – small everything. That is to be expected.
As the baby grows, the hope is that each part of its body will grow proportionally. The legs will grow longer at the same speed and at a sufficient pace to hold up the growing body.
Now picture your business as that baby. The head is Management. The main upper body is Operations (what your business does). One leg is Marketing and the other one is Finance.
When your business is small, all of these vital components are small. As the business scales, the parts start getting bigger.
Unfortunately the growth is not automatically proportional. It’s easy to end up with odd situations like these:
The owners I spent time with this week were both in the condition of Picture 2. They had decent management, booming operations, decent marketing, but a horrible finance foundation. The health (and even the very existence) of their companies are in jeopardy because of this.
Your job as an entrepreneur is to make sure the growth happens proportionally, and to shore up the lagging areas.
The future of your company depends on it.
