Have you ever set sales growth or business growth goals and missed them? Hell, maybe you miss them time-and-time again. Have you ever struggled to figure out why that is? Could it have anything to do with organizational health?
Growth is a funny thing. often times business owners and CEOs turn to marketing when they are looking to hit growth goals. Marketing is very important however is it the first place you should be looking? I’m going to say an emphatic… NO! Wow, really? Yep!
Okay so your probably thinking… then Dale must be going to say Sales right? NOPE! Here’s the deal sales and marketing are extremely important when it comes to growth, but I’m going to take a holistic approach for the CEOs. Let’s zoom up and take a 50,000 foot view and try to simplify things some. There are 3 main areas of a business. Imagine there are 3 boxes sitting side by side. The first box is “Sales & Marketing”. The second box moving to the right and in the center is the “Operations” box. Then let’s continue moving to the right the third and final box is “Finance & Admin”.
So the 3 areas every business must master are…
- Sales & Marketing
- Operations
- Finance & Admin
Now are you shrugging and thinking… “well, yeah!“? Are you also thinking… “um… this is pretty basic, can we move on and get to the meaty stuff already?”?
Most companies would be saying this. However most companies fail in the first 5 years and then a huge chunk of the rest of them flounder and fly blind for years never breaking through to real success. Some are mildly successful in spite of themselves, and their efforts but still struggle to break through to the next level of growth they are shooting for.
There is a common saying in the sales world and in the owners world that goes like this… “Nothing gets done if we do not sell something!“. On some level this is correct. However what happens if the sales team sells a bunch of deals and the operations team can’t deliver? Well… you lose all your customers, right? Yeah and because of this you are unable to scale and grow.
Now lets say sales is killing it, close a ton of deals and operations is delivering great products/services to your customers. What if the finance department doesn’t really keep up with the books, what if they do not send invoices very quickly and don’t bother managing A/R (accounts receivable) and A/P (accounts payable). Then what happens? Your company is losing money hand over fist and not only are you unable to grow, you are on your way to bankruptcy because the money is flowing like crazy out the back door.
What if we looked at this from the other side. Finance is rocking it. The books are clean and up to date. They are on-top of A/R and A/P. They are creating monthly reports and creating great predictions and forecasting. Sounds great right? Now what if operations has the Midas touch and every client job and account turns to gold. Yeah this sound F’in’ amazing right? Well what is the sales and marketing team suck? If in this situation operations is golden and finance is killing it but there are no clients, then everyone is sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
So I hope that giving a quick overview of the 3 basic areas that must be working in order to hit your growth goals, scale your business and then sustain it once you are growing, was helpful. If I hit on some new ideas or things for you to consider or look closely at in your business, you may be asking yourself… “Wow, how to we check on this stuff? How can we flush out problems in these areas?” Here is what I will tell you… get focused on understanding the big picture. Step back from the day-to-day figure out the health of your organization.
How do you master these 3 areas?
Start by setting a baseline of where you are at currently.
Take 5-10 minutes to do an Organizational Checkup and figure out if maybe the health of your company is actually what is hindering you hitting your business growth goals. We hope this helps and wish you the best of luck! Here’s to a highly successful 2015!
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