As you scale your businesses it’s important to prioritize your actions but first you need to audit for leakage. It can occur anywhere in the connected body you call your business. Think of scaling in it’s very basic form as a sequential set of events. If you had the chance to stop the engine and restart the business it would feel like this.
Defining who you want to be drives what you want to build, and the story you want to tell, which drives the sales leads for your sales team, which drives the sales scripts they use. Operations and production are driven by these agendas. Customer support and installation teams take these objectives and ensure that customers achieve the success they were looking for. Simple enough. All connected. All aligned. As businesses grow leakage creeps in.
Problems occur because of Leakage
Here are a few examples to help you get growth back into your business and prioritize scaling actions.
- Positioning: You fail to define your special space you are capable of monopolizing.
- Product Road Map: Products aren’t fit for their sectors. They lack specific functionality needed by customers.
- Marketing: Blog posts aren’t frequent enough, story isn’t compelling, lead generation is weak, web site narratives lack consistency.
- Sales: No process in place, sales scripts are not connected to the marketing story, product knowledge patchy.
- Operations: Wrong stuff is measured, access to key ratios is tortuous, analysis of financial performance is weak.
- Production: The workflow of the factory is disconnected from POs coming in from sales, weekly shipments aren’t driven to generate cash, quality control is weak causing costly re-runs and corrections.
- Customer Support: Onboarding of new customers is not formalized, communication between sales and customer support is weak.
