While setting the course for your company’s future is the responsibility of the CEO, no skipper would navigate his boat on the changing seas without input from his crew. Yet so often, the CEO is moving so rapidly that your team- charged with execution- is left to execute the last communicated course, not the CEO’s real time thinking. Worse the CEO doesn’t have input from the field to influence the course. The result is “Vision Gap”. When Vision Gap is eliminated, it makes room for powerful vision-driven growth to take place.
Fortunately, you are the leader of a company that employs a talented team committed to help you achieve the company’s potential through their assigned roles. Invite your top team members- perhaps 6-10 people to discover which future you really want. Be sure to include representatives from each discipline: operations, marketing, finance, product development, personal to uncover a composite picture. This is different from getting a story from a single person who by definition can only see the picture from their own perspective.
Yet a multidiscipline group can be hard to work with because each member comes to the table with a different set of experiences and responsibilities, like the old fable about the 6 blind men describing an elephant. Certainly the one holding the tail has a different experience of this huge animal than the one holding the elephant’s ear. Yet with careful coordination and communication, these blind men actually do come up with an accurate picture as each reveals a critical detail from his feel of things- a perspective not available to the others.
Similarly, you might be surprised what your operations person has to say about marketing, or your controller has to say about marketing. In this way, each manager contributes different economic building blocks of your company’s uniqueness that might otherwise be taken for granted. Taken together, these building blocks distinctly describe your company in a way that couldn’t describe any other company, and becomes your company’s competitive economic distinction.
If you were under the mistaken impression that this was a “normal business strategy session” you‘re in for a surprise. This creative process is more like a talented jazz ensemble of highly specialized and talented players who quickly begin to improvise together, letting each member take the opportunity for a solo before passing the spot light on to the next player. Ultimately this team unifies in a wonderful common harmony which ties all the individual themes together.
Vision-driven growth allows these motivated mangers to locate the intersection of where value drivers for their customer and the team’s own passion brilliantly point to what your company does best. Best of all, during the process, each manager gets very clear on how each can personally drive value in your company and everyone buys into the excitement of living this bold plan.
The result is your optimum growth strategy- the strategy that delivers the highest return for lowest risk built upon what you do best. Your unique business model which no one execute as well as you do.
Are you ready to liberate your optimum growth strategy? All entrepreneurs know that business strategy and finance strategy are related. Unfortunately, most link these strategies in the wrong way. Conventional wisdom declares that the availability of resources dictates business strategy. As entrepreneurs, our greatest skill is surviving on scarce resources as a start up. However, if you don‘t shift that thinking at the right time, it will stunt your possibilities forever- like a child that chooses to crawl, never developing the muscle power necessary to walk and run. Your optimum growth strategy requires a separation of business possibilities from financial assumptions. This works because there is currency in your passion, as you will discover. Are you ready to convert your growth potential into profitable reality?
Once you reveal your company’s uniqueness you have a safe foundation upon which to achieve your company’s growth—profitable growth, faster safer than you ever thought possible, sustainable in a competitive global marketplace.
Stefania Aulicino is founder president of CapitalLInkUSA. For 20 years Stefania has helped business builders uncover the right capital for their optimum growth strategy so you get cash and keep control to build the business you really want. www.CapitalLinkUSA.com
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