Challenges facing scale-up business owners & growing businesses
To unearth potential and keep improving is key for business growth and development, but it requires change and a positive change mindset. The problem is, where to start? How do you know what changes are the right changes, and how do you engage your workforce and make change happen and then stick?
Many SME business owners have started their businesses from experience of ‘being the practitioner’ in their specified sector or skill. Whilst this can typically stand them in good stead for many years and to a certain level of growth, typically they plateau and wonder why it becomes increasingly more difficult to grow and sustain growth and a work-life balance.
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Challenges for growth
1) To evolve from being a ‘business owner’ who is involved in everything and actively running the ship from bottom to the top, to a leader of people who gets results through others. Sounds straight-forward doesn’t it, but many people find it difficult to let go of the day-to-day running of the business and spending time on developing the strategy for the business, motivating and encouraging the staff and dealing with tricky personnel issues can cause huge problems, sometimes with painful consequences. Getting the right support for you to make that transition is vital for your business to continue to grow.
2) To build a truly winning leadership team. Business owners often soldier on with people who were great in the beginning when the business was very small, but are not always the right people to help really scale the business, or are able to grow at the pace the business desires or needs.
3) To invest or raise funds to support growth or putting in place and executing a change management strategy.
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All of this is extremely difficult if you have never reached this stage before in your business, or experienced change management in any other company. This is why a strategy and tactical execution plan is vital and more importantly a business mentor/coach who has successfully taken the journey and who can guide and drive you through the necessary change management steps to take your business to the next level.
Why Optima?
We work to really understand your business, getting under its skin and uncovering the truth. Being an external and impartial resource, we can help guide the change process, assisting with plan creation and working with you to engage your teams with the new direction.
Implementation is where many change initiatives fail and many consultants are not around, they have just delivered a plan and left the company to implement. At Optima we are different, we are happy to get our hands dirty and will be with you from start to finish, including implementation. We work seamlessly with every level of your organisation to instill in them the confidence, skills and insight to succeed.