Stage 1: Startup Venture

• Business start-up with 1-5 employees that needs to focus on product development.
   
• Priority: Nail your value proposition.
  • Understand what are you selling, at what price point, in what packaging and what marketing to undertake to make your market want to buy your product or service.
• Barrier: Market Dynamics
  • How is the market running today, who are your competitors, what prices are they selling their product or service for, what are their discounts?
• Ability: Marketing.
  • Have a conversation with your client. Understand what are you selling them and what they want to buy.
• Decision: Strategy
  • Create and update your business plan.

Stage 2: Growing Small Business

• Small business with 6-15 employees, that needs to focus 100% on sales.
   
• Priority: Hire the right team.
  • You cannot be very selective during the first stage, so use this stage to select the right team members.
• Barrier: Leadership
  • Begin leading a team.
     
  • Learn how to delegate and define direction.
• Ability: Predict, Delegate and Repeat
  • Create repetitive processes and build your systems.
• Decision: People and Cash
  • Hire the right people and understand what it is to be a leader.
     
  • Be cash-wise for cash constraints.
    • Example: Your people see that the company is growing and start asking for a higher salary.

Stage 3: Business Scaling Up

• Priority: Scale up.
  • After you build your team and have your systems in place you begin to scale up.
• Barrier: Infrastructure.
  • Look for systems that will help create great structure in your company.
• Ability: Align and Simplify.
  • Analyse your systems and make them easier and simpler.
     
  • Align people with just one or two things.
• Decision: Execution.
  • Now that you have your product, your team and your systems, replicate that as fast and as cheaply as possible.
• Functional Organisational Chart.
  • As a medium sized company, it is important to have that chart in order to give structure to your team.
    • CEO
       
    • The first level of management:
      • EA (executive assistant)  – delegate all small fixes so you don’t have to do them.
         
      • HR/LO (HR Leadership & Organization) – that’s  HR on a strategic level, that will hire and coach your first line of executives.

• Service Oriented Functional Organizational Chart.
  • Turn your Functional Organisational Chart upside down.
     
  • Leadership in stage 3:  manage and help the people above you to be more productive.
     
  • The people on top of the chart, who are in touch with the client are the most important people in your organisation.

• Identify and remove the bottleneck.
   
• Evolve to leader of leaders.

Stage 4: Large business

• Priorities: Continuous growth.
   
• Ability: Be a strategic innovator and a catalyst of change.
   
• Evolve from a leader to a satellite gravitating around the company on day-to-day operations and foresee the trends.

• The S-curve of a product lifecycle. 

  • Once you have a client for your product, instead of investing in the same product, invest in another product to up-sell.

• To 10x your company and 10x your team in terms of mentality and training.

• Levels of Management / Training:

  • Individual contributors.

    • Frontline employees – train them on:

      • Technical know-how (teach them what they do, so they do it better)

      • Focus

      • Productivity – Results

      • Humbleness – Cultural fit.
         

  • First-time leaders: 

    • Foreman, supervisor, superintendents – train them to:

      • Be great listeners

      • Create performance pattern recognition

      • High-performance teams

      • Talent development
         

  • Leaders of leaders:

    • Departmental Managers – train them to:

      • Identify the right person for the right position

      • How to develop leaders

      • Big picture

      • Negotiation

      • Predictable skills
         

  • Leaders of the Organization

    • C-level Executives, Vice-presidents – train them on:

      • People

      • Change management

      • Global vision
         

• The 4’C rule; how to get confident.

  •  Commitment – Example: Make a commitment: I am going to do THIS by THAT date.

  • Courage – The commitment will push you to have the courage to change and learn new systems and procedures

  • Capability - Courage will help you build new capabilities.by learning new systems and procedures.

  • Confidence – Having these new capabilities will help you have more confidence in execution.