|
Through being able to oversee the growth of @contentcal from a birds eye view, you realise that on a week-by-week basis you achieve micro-wins: more sales, more visits to the website, more customers.
At the same time, you’re focusing on the long-term vision of the company, which in turn creates the capacity to achieve the small wins at scale. From April-June, the progress at @ContentCal means we’re close to having added a quarter of our total customer base in 3 months. Our goal is to double our customer base every 6 months. When we’re operating week-to-week, we can’t see the huge changes we need to make to enable that 3-6 month goal, but, similarly to how we’re tuned into achieving the week-to-week goals, we’re tuned into achieving our long-term goals too, which means we focus on having the resource and capacity in place to grow. We’ve got to have a macro-focus to enable scale of the micro-results.
0 Comments
When it comes to doing ambitious things at work I’ve learned it’s not about getting everything right all the time and always succeeding - it’s about doing a lot and getting more things right than wrong. When you try a lot of things, many of them may not come off, but 1 or 2 of those will massively pay off and could change your entire business. If you’re in a growth business, you have to embrace the chaos.
There’s always a period of madness in start-ups where you’re starting something for the first time and trying to make it work. You build a new marketing plan, it’s going to take 3-6 months to work. You build a new sales plan, it’s going to take 3-6 months to work. It’s going to be awkward, there’s going to be mistakes, you’re going to find it uncomfortable and unorganised. If you don’t like that feeling, you’re in the wrong building. If you want to influence the direction of the company, you’ve got to learn to be comfortable with the chaos and work together with your people to figure it out. Entrepreneurs are typically brilliant at starting companies, but running a company is a very different challenge.
Some thrive on the nature of doing everything that the start of a company requires, but there comes a time when you can’t do everything anymore and the focus then becomes on building a team that can help you achieve everything - this transition suits some entrepreneurs in becoming more typical ‘CEO’s’ and it doesn’t suit others. The most important challenge for any entrepreneur going through that transition is being self-aware as to how they are best utilised helping the company. It becomes about focus. I spoke about my own experiences with this adapting period on my audioblog - https://anchor.fm/alexpackham/episodes/The-difference-in-skills-between-starting-a-business-and-running-a-business-ecasmb Recently we’ve added a crucial component to our company values - welcoming change.
We understand that to grow as a business, you have to be able to change and adapt. But change is a mindset. It can be quite tough to get people to welcome change and be able to adapt when the business needs it. By embedding it into our company values, it means that anyone in our team has to be a person who is able to welcome change. One of the most interesting things I’ve been studying recently is how every scenario you go through in life, someone has been through it before and written about it somewhere.
There’s a framework for near enough every situation out there written by someone that can help you approach your own experience of it. As we’ve been going through this period of change as a company, leaning on others who have experienced it has been really useful to helping us find different perspectives on growth. |
Archive
August 2020
Categories |
RSS Feed
