Growing your Business: How Good are You at Spinning Plates?

Dear Reader

This month we look at the sometimes unforeseen pressures and demand for new skills on business leaders who decide to grow their business.

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With best wishes,

Derek Allen at CMC

tel: 07803 281358 email:Derek@cmc-partnership.com

How Good are You at Spinning Plates?

Have you ever watched the circus act of spinning plates? The act starts with one or two plates and builds up to maybe ten or eleven, but by then the first one is wobbling. The tension builds as more and more new plates are set spinning and more and more plates start to wobble.

In helping owner managers grow their businesses, what we do has a lot in common with that circus performer! If there are ten ‘plates' spinning in any business, a few will be wobbling and a couple about to crash to the floor. Our skill, like the circus act, is to know which of the wobbling plates need attention and which can be left a few seconds more.

Incremental Steps

Growing your business usually means taking incremental steps forward involving your own people. We help you identify an area you need to focus on - finance and accounts, people, or maybe marketing and sales - and guide the change as necessary until it takes root.

If you don't have the skills in house we may help you recruit, or recommend a locum appointment from our professional network. Sometimes one of our own partners may have the specific skill needed. Usually the amount of business coming in quickly increases, to everyone's satisfaction.

However, your business's new activity level produces stresses. What looks like a successful initiative suddenly causes other departments, systems and processes in the business to fail, and it's easy to assume that there is something very badly wrong.

There's Nothing Wrong!

You're the owner of a business undertaking the scary step of triggering a phase of growth - it's normal to be nervous. You have rocked the boat, and initiated a period of rapidly changing needs as your business grows. Higher volumes of incoming business put pressure on different parts of your business and this is perfectly normal!

Start the plates spinning, then learn to stand back and observe as first one, then another starts to wobble. Apply your focus to each area and strengthen it as necessary to meet the new demands on it.

A really masterful circus performer keeps the plates spinning effortlessly without getting tense or stressed, always there in time to catch the wobbling plate and set it spinning again. He could keep going for ever.

Learn to Love the Change

This is challenging for you as a business owner. You may tend to be nervous of change - it's your 'baby' after all - and feel a certain relief when things seem to have 'settled down'.

But that's not the way business growth works - it's much more akin to the circus act. You need to develop a mindset that says, 'there's nothing wrong: this is the way it should be'. And develop observation skills to spot when an area of your business begins to totter and needs some input.

Don't Even Try to do it all Yourself

In this more dynamic phase of your business you shouldn't expect to resolve every bottleneck yourself. During earlier phases of your business, you could be 'hands-on', fixing things yourself. Now you must let your staff, the heads of each function in the business, do the 'fixing'.

Your job is to understand the dynamic, observe where the wobbly bits are, and direct appropriate action in the right direction. That way you can scale up your business, and in time get a feel for where the next issue is likely to come up. Your mindset will shift from regarding growth not as a threat but as an opportunity, not as stress, but as fun!

There's Help Out There!

We can help in two ways:

• Firstly supporting and training you in how to spot the pinch points in your growing business.
• Secondly, as a pair of experienced hands (or to help you find some) to actually fix issues that arise.

You cannot do it all by yourself, nor should you even try. Give us a call on 07803 281358 or email us: Derek@cmc-partnership.com for help to get started, and the support you need to become masterful at spinning plates!

Faltering Finance Function

In a manufacturing client with large production facilities, the finance function was first to feel the pressure. As sales ramped up, pressure was immediately felt on cash flow with more materials on long lead times from abroad, larger orders needing better credit control and better cash collection.

Then the business needed better management data, supplied at a lower level of management. Better data established the next pressure point: in Production. As sales increased, margins were eroded because of inherent inefficiencies in production processes.

The focus is now on overtime costs, economic batch sizes, improved materials handling and storage and transport costs.

Teetering Office Processes

In a service sector business with offices in the Midlands and the Thames Valley, more business coming in and recruitment of new staff in both areas put pressure on business processes. The way things were done had evolved to suit a smaller business - staff created processes as they went along and retained most of the detail in their heads!