Growth is Difficult to Predict, Ignoring it Leads to Disaster!

Two of the most pressing challenges you face are the ability to innovate as a small business and your personal capacity to absorb change.

Both can be daunting, but are, in fact, your acid test for survival.

Growth carries with it four problems:

Every one of your managers is programmed to prefer no change to change - a fact of nature.
The world will continue to pressure you to improve. It is a law of survival that many small businesses have not fully accepted. The old way of business will come back is still a belief held by many many people.
A high percentage of your growth ideas will not bear fruit. This is to be expected.
An innovative, growth oriented mindset requires that your company become proactive, not just reactive. By proactive, we mean that you act on your environment in a forward-moving, expectant manner.

The vast majority of small businesses are so busy re-acting that they give up any hope of pro-activity and creative management. Yet, that is the very thing they must do.

The good news is that only one person needs to change - the owner. This is where your personal capacity to absorb change comes into play. More about that later.

Take a new look at change and growth

The solution is for you to lead change. You can eliminate the old idea of “managing change” and of “overcoming resistance to change”. Those are very old concepts that never worked and never will.

You can lead change.

You can create your future success, and you can build a great small business.

The first step is to recast your role. Think about your current role, how you spend your time and what you want from the business over the next 18 months. With that in mind, ask yourself if you would apply for this position.

A new view: Would you accept this position?

Five responsibilities:

Invest a minimum of 25% of your week in designing policies that fit your company’s real world challenges, to create the future.
Create three systematic methods to scan your environment, looking for and anticipating change.
Determine the very best fail-safe way to introduce change, both inside and outside the organization.
Determine what new skills and learning your own top team will need over the next 12 – 18 month period. Then design ways to make it happen.
Invest 75% of your time in insuring continuity with current business and movement toward the future.

What if you are too busy?

Now imagine that you decided to turn down this position. Perhaps you are too busy. Maybe you cannot delegate your current workload. Maybe your team is stretched too thin.

If you cannot take on this job, it simply means that, as owner of the business, you are working far below your level. You are, in effect, a worker bee.