For many entrepreneurs, getting back on the path to success is as simple as looking hard in the mirror.
The challenges of creating and building a business that gets to scale and can generate real wealth for its founders are many. Navigating the maze of steps required to create marketable products or services; building customer demand; financing growth; recruiting and retaining employees before cash flow is sufficient to pay good salaries - all this is not easy.
You're Not Alone
In grappling with these and other challenges, most entrepreneurs tend to make one or more “Type I” errors. These are the errors that come from executing a company’s strategy meticulously - even as the company is headed to failure. The company is adhering to its plan - but it’s not growing; isn’t profitable or isn’t meeting the metrics that measure progress in execution of its strategy.
The founder/CEO is beginning to lose the trust of investors, customers or employees, or all three. How did things come to this point? The CEO may have trusted too much to his own intuition. He may have cherry picked information to support his assumptions, instead of subjecting the business plan to rigorous testing. Or he may not have built a comprehensive model to really address how the different parts of the business fit together and how they are funded.
Needed: Admit you’re wrong
For a company that is going in the wrong direction, changing course requires personal change on the part of the CEO, the sort of change that enables him to admit “I may be wrong.” This admission leads to looking hard at “legacy” beliefs - bedrock convictions that the entrepreneur has never before had to question.
For example: “customers will pay more for our products because they are so much better than the competition’s.” Or that, because the sales manager was right for the company in its early stages, he has what it takes to catapult the company to its next level of growth.
In my next article, I will be detailing these four steps that are designed to help middle market CEOs face reality and change course:
-
Question what has never before been questioned.
-
Get new data.
-
Innovate, innovate, innovate.
-
Lose your fear of looking inconsistent.
About the Author
As a CEO, Director and Advisor to CEO’s on strategy and governance, Mike has compiled a track record of navigating complexity, refining business models and cultivating leadership. Learn more or contact Mike directly here.
Connect with Mike on LinkedIn
Image Credit: Flickr
