Video transcript:
Hello and welcome to the first video in our series: How To Build a Scalable Business.
In this series, we are going to build out a complete guide and toolkit to help you, the founding entrepreneurs and senior leaders of established SMEs, build scalable businesses. These are businesses that will be able to add significant growth efficiently and sustainably; if that’s what you and your team choose to do.
The remaining sections in this video blog post are:
- Your FREE Guide and Toolkit: What To Expect
- Complete A Self-Assessment Of Your Business
- 36 Focal Points with Tools, Tips and Examples
- Why This Series Matters For Owners And Leaders Of Established SMEs
- How To Get Started
- Next Steps
- Helpful Links
Your FREE Guide and Toolkit: What To Expect
Planned Ascent’s purpose is to help entrepreneurs, businesses and society prosper. So the first thing to expect is that we will be making this guide and toolkit available to you, completely free of charge.
Each entry will comprise a short video; plus a transcript to read, slides to review or audio to listen to, as you prefer. The choice is yours to either watch, read, or listen.
We will also provide you with links to our own and third party tools, helpful resources and further references to help you make best use of your time.
We’ll be publishing at minimum once a week, so the series will progress at pace with the next piece of content never far away. If you subscribe to the blog using the button at the end of this video, we’ll notify you whenever we add a new entry.
Complete A Self-Assessment Of Your Business
This articles in this series will equip you with everything you need to complete a quick, yet comprehensive, self-assessment of your business. From this starting point, you will be able to:
- Review the ability of your business to support scalable growth
- Prioritise areas that need attention and design solutions to strengthen them
- Embed, refine and ultimately scale these successfully
You can use the guide and toolkit alone, or with the support of an expert business coach who will complement your skills, insights and experience with their own. This will accelerate your progress towards the outcomes you want.
The guide and toolkit has been developed through our work with valued clients, who predominantly own and lead established SMEs employing between 15 and 50 people offering communications, digital and technology services, albeit with some notable exceptions.
It is also based on considerable personal experience of running small and medium-sized creative and consulting businesses and of the end to end entrepreneurial journey from start-up to exit. For more information, you can read about the career story of our Founder, Tim Cornell, here.
36 Focal Points with Tools, Tips and Examples
The architecture for the series is drawn from our Growth Mapping framework. This provides a clear overview of a business in terms everyone can understand and use, and is explained in a short video that you can access directly at the end of this one.
The framework considers 36 features of your business, both individually and as an integrated system, and the extent to which they provide the solid and stable foundations needed for sustainable growth.
We will start by considering three core issues:
- The ownership of your business, both legally and regarding the felt ownership of key employees, and the adequacy of the arrangements you have in place to manage this
- Your business model, including how clearly defined and understood this is, its fitness for purpose and how regularly it is reviewed and optimised to future-proof your business
- Your operating system, what this means and how work to improve this will only be effective if the previous two focal points are aligned with it and with each other
We will then look at seven focal points in each of four dimensions:
- We’ll look backwards, to consider your formative experience and how this has shaped and continues to influence your business today
- We’ll look inwards, to gauge the inner strength of your business including how well it is resourced, structured and managed today to control costs and enable value-creation
- We’ll look outwards, to review the value-added for your customers by your products and services, plus the six other focal points which drive revenues and perceptions of your brand
- We’ll look forwards, to consider the chosen path that your business is on, including the critical elements of business strategy that will deliver the future outcomes you want
Next, we’ll consider how the decisions you make in all of these 31 areas shape the culture of your business – what this means and why it is critical for your present and future success.
Finally, we’ll review four external factors that are beyond your immediate sphere of influence yet can significantly affect your business performance and prospects.
Why This Series Matters For Owners And Leaders Of SMEs
Adopting a scalable business mindset today will ensure that your business is designed and managed to easily support further growth to the level you choose.
It will also increase the likelihood that you can realise its full potential and value at a future point commensurate with your investment into it; and have choices about how you do that and about the legacy you create.
As importantly, it will make the journey between now and then so much more rewarding for you, your employees and all of the stakeholders in your business as you pursue your purpose, fulfil your mission and achieve your goals.
This is all more easily said than done, however. So we have designed this series, and the accompanying toolkit, to help you think clearly about where to focus and what to prioritise to make your business more sustainable, scalable and saleable.
We hope that some of you will choose to work with us in applying the framework and toolkit to your business, and the testimonials on our website attest to the results that can be achieved when this happens.
For those of you who choose not to, we sincerely hope that you find the framework and toolkit valuable, and will welcome your feedback and comments on the relevant blog entries.
How To Get Started
To get started today, we recommend that you:
- Watch the video which explains the Growth Mapping framework (2 mins 30 seconds),
- Subscribe to this blog, by completing this simple form,
- Book an introductory call using the button below if you want to discuss the option of working with a coach to make a fast start and maximum progress.
Next Steps
Our next post will address the first issue at the core of the Growth Mapping framework: Ownership.
If you have any questions, comments or ideas for future articles you would like us to cover, please leave them below along with your rating of this one.
Thank you in advance and whether or not we hear from you, we wish you the very best of luck with your business.
Helpful links
Growth Mapping Framework: Explanatory Video
What are Coaching Sprints? Video Script
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