For leaders growing and scaling a business
Growing and scaling a business?
Whether you’re building your organisation now or starting your next one, design how it works before the problems become embedded. If you’ve done this before, you’ve already seen what doesn’t work. It won’t be perfect, but it will be far easier to run and to scale than the organisations most of us have known.
What usually goes wrong
Growth makes everything bigger, including the problems.
Growth and acquisition multiply weaknesses as well as strengths when the underlying operating system is unclear.
In a growing business, decisions get made quickly, by capable people, under pressure. Each one is reasonable at the time. But when the right expertise enters those decisions at different times, the choices compound into an organisation that becomes harder and more expensive to run, manage and change.
Get it right while it’s still easy to change.
The opportunity
Don’t let today’s organisation become the specification for tomorrow’s.
The best time to design how your organisation works is before habits, systems and structures set. Decide deliberately how your people, processes, technology and partners will work together, while those choices can still be influenced. Make them well and the organisation works right first time, rather than needing to be fixed later.
How Alex helps
Building it right first time
01 / Understand
See the organisation as people experience it
Start with what customers, employees and partners actually encounter.
02 / Idealise
Define what is needed
Define what the business needs to accomplish before reaching for familiar solutions.
03 / Design
Connect the expertise
Bring customer, operations, process, technology, people, data, finance and risk together, so important decisions are made together.
04 / Learn
Let reality improve it
Use evidence from how the organisation actually performs to keep improving as you grow.
What you get
A business that can explain itself.
Your Business User Manual sets out, in a few pages, what the organisation does, why it does it and how it works.
As you grow, new people can understand how the business is meant to run, and the manual grows with the organisation without becoming an administrative burden.
Who you’ll be working with
Someone who has built businesses, not just advised them.
Alex has done what he now helps others do.
- He founded Technodisc in 1984 and built it from a concept to a $14m business with 120 staff, before selling it to Dakota plc.
- As CEO of IDOC, he grew European revenue from $500k to $10m, acquired three competitors to reach $60m, and sold the group to Bowne, forming Bowne Global Solutions.
- At Dell, he grew the EMEA Asset Recovery business from $5m to $80m in 15 months, while cutting operating costs by 20% and increasing capacity by 250% at the same cost.
In 2003 he co-founded Expertivity Technologies, and has since helped more than seventy organisations improve how they operate.
Further reading
Who Designed Your Organisation?
Who Designed Your Organisation? shows how founders and established organisations can reduce operational debt, improve execution and build the strength to grow.
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