Get Cash Keep Control BLOG

By Stefania Aulicino

Do you spend your time focused on growing your company’s best future? Or are you really relegated to just focusing on today’s immediate needs? Is there a tug of war between short term cash flow and long term big profits? Between survival today and quantum leap success tomorrow? It’s the business builders’ challenge.

What is your passion-driven growth? Consider your revenue today; what is your profit margin on your current level of sales? Now, project out 5 years capturing all your best profit making opportunities. What is your revenue out 5 years from now? What is your new profit margin? Is it 1.5x, 2x or more bigger than today? So, what’s holding you back?

3 Stages of growth. You are a successful business owner with a passion to make a difference in the world. You had a salaried job, but you saw a better way to serve your clients. Your commitment to excellence drove you to break out. You are a special breed- a business owner, ready and willing to build a future only you could see. Your reputation, integrity and laser focus is paying off. Your innovative products or services delivered better than you promised and word of mouth has resulted in raving fans who encourage others to buy, because your solution is that important to them; sales and profits followed. You remember with fondness stage 1 of the passionate entrepreneurs’ growth stage: Passion dictated every decision. The team culture was cohesive. Such a pure message and experience in the marketplace fueled the early years of the company’s growth. Instinctively, at stage 1 you pursued a passion-driven growth strategy.

Then came the terrible 2’s- the 2nd growth stage. continue reading…

By Stefania Aulicino

“I wanted to grow, but I was afraid to grow. Didn’t want to add more staff to manage.
My time is scacre as it is. Don’t know I can handle any more.
Sure I know there is opportunity out there, but financing is always a struggle and I just don’t have the energy to fight so many battles
Wonder if I would be better off with a corporate job again”.
On our worst days as Entrepreneurs, do you ever have secret fears like those shared by Bill, above?
When Bill shared this with me I offered him a solution, in the form of a question:
Are you pursing your OPTIMUM GROWTH STRATEGY?
“Growth?! Our growth is what I can finance.”

That is the beginning of the problem for too many Entrepreneurs.

What is at stake is your Optimum Growth Strategy: the one that delivers the highest return with the lowest risk.
As entrepreneurs, we all know that Growth does not occur without Finance to fuel it.
But too many entrepreneurs link these strategies in the wrong way.
The right way is to insist that GROWTH strategy dictate FINANCE strategy, never the reverse.
If you try to address FINANCE first, you end up reaching out to the wrong types of sources and you don’t get full value so you end up paying more than you should. continue reading…

By Stefania Aulicino

YouTube, Twitter, Groupon, and Zynga are members of a new club– “fastest from founding to $1B valuation” club, — Zynga, the social gaming pioneer, earned its membership in just 19 months.

Explosive growth is not confined to social media companies.
Costco (the membership warehouse retailer chain was the first company to grow from zero to $3 billion in sales in less than six years and today is $78 B in revenue.

Think of other fast growing companies you admire.
Disney, Four Seasons Hotel, Patagonia, South West Airlines, Harley Davidson, Green Mountain Coffee, Target, Legos

Why do all these companies grow so fast?
My interpretation is that successful fast growing companies leverage cheap customer acquisition models!
To be a sustainable growth company in the 21st century you need to build a cheap, scalable, automatic model to acquire customers

Please note: customer acquisition is NOT the same as sales acquisition.
• sales and marketing strategies are about how to get people to buy what you have to sell today
• customer acquisition is building a continuous pipeline of people who will buy
anything you can sell them today and in the future at, at higher prices, with accelerating frequency.
continue reading…