Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Entrepreneurial Businesses

Improve or die.

1. Scaling a personal service business depends on having good hiring and training processes and low employee turnover.

Commonly used good hiring practices aim to mitigate the natural inclination to hire people like oneself.

My research found three consistent areas that entrepreneurs focused on in building positive growth company cultures: 1. meaning; 2. fun; and 3. emotional rewards.

Innovations: Something New Innovations involve doing something new that your competition is not doing.

You can improve every internal business process from answering the phone to billing, hiring, training, communicating with and evaluating employees, aligning measurements and rewards, and detecting and correcting variances and mistakes.

trying to increase people’s capacities, or else they’ve got to “get off the bus,” to quote Jim Collins.

“Set up three or four priorities that take precedence over everything else: (1) manage cash flow, (2) focus on customers and quality service, (3) accelerate revenue growth, and (4) all the rest—unless something is on fire—can wait.

“Focus on the areas of the business that are critical to making it to next month, next quarter, and next year.

Growth Decision Template 1. Why should we grow? 2. How should we grow? 3. How much should we grow? 4. How fast should we grow? 5. Do we have the right people, processes, and controls in place to support growth? 6. What are the risks of growth? 7. What are the risks of not growing? 8. Do the benefits of growth outweigh the risks? 9. How do we manage