Building the 4 Key Knowledge Areas to Succeed
Welcome back to this third part of our four part series all about how successful entrepreneurs establish consistent levels of growth in their businesses. In today’s blog we explore the importance of building the relevant levels and types of knowledge to ensure that your business realises its current and future growth ambitions.
Building The Infrastructure To Succeed
Successful entrepreneurs recognise the importance of building the infrastructure (systems & processes) to allow the business to realise its true potential.
There’s no doubt that infrastructure is indeed one of the most important factors in determining the rate of growth in any business. It is the key to accelerated growth as well as further down the line a successful exit.
Put another way…. systems and processes are the essential building blocks that underpin every great organisation.?
Great systems and processes create the leverage that allows every successful business to realise the following benefits, namely;
Improved Top-Line Performance
Part of any great business system is the development and implementation of strategy creation, business processes and strategic planning throughout your organization. These foundational elements lead to a much more insightful and focused way to grow top-line revenue.?
In short, great business systems take care of your future. They ensure that you meet your customers’ expectations and improve your brand reputation, which is key to growing a healthy business.
Reduced Cost and Increased Profits
It has been proven time and again that the implementation of sound business systems helps reduce costs. A business system is intended to reduce costs without taking the shortcuts that often lead to an erosion of profitability due to the necessity to lower quality expectations or service levels.
Meeting Customer’s Expectations
If you use a systematic approach, your organization will analyse, measure, compare and test all the possibilities of what your customers want and don’t want. You will have constant information on areas that need to be improved and, even more importantly, you will begin to understand the unmet needs of customers. A business system is key to improving the brand that the organization projects to your community, including customers, employees and suppliers
Employee Engagement:?
The goal of the system is to enable proper education and opportunities to all employees so they can complete their work more efficiently and effectively. We also seek to harness their ideas and creativity and, in the process, increase their personal engagement. Additionally, having the system in place allows you to quickly integrate new-hires, and makes it easy for them to see their role within the organization and bring forth new ideas.
Consistent Results
Whether considering safety, quality or getting the job done in a timely manner, a business system is designed to give you effective, efficient and repeatable results. In short, the business system gives you a?process to fix your processes.?
Building The Knowledge To Succeed
In order to be a successful entrepreneur, it is essential to build knowledge in multiple areas. For many first-time entrepreneurs who either started their businesses off the back of a great idea or simply because they had tired of working for someone else, it’s often a steep learning curve.
For most entrepreneurs, the initial priority is building their?Business Knowledge?so as to ensure that they have a strong working knowledge of the main functional areas, namely sales, marketing, finance, HR and operations.
Others need to develop their?Entrepreneurial Knowledge?in order to ensure that they are able to raise the necessary growth capital and then ensure that they have adopted the right business model to create a business that is able to prosper over the long-term.
As the entrepreneurial journey evolves others will need to develop?Opportunity Specific Knowledge?in order to gain greater understanding of specific markets that they are operating within and/or entering with a view to ensuring that they are able to compete strongly.
Finally, there’s invariably a need for entrepreneurs to develop?Venture Specific Knowledge?in order?to know exactly what it takes to run a successful enterprise within a specific sector or market.
Similarly, as an entrepreneur you’re likely to have to work closely with others and hence it becomes crucial that you’re able to build good relationships with your team, customers, suppliers, shareholders, investors and other stakeholders.?
领英推荐
Whilst some entrepreneurs are naturally more gifted than others in this area, the importance of improving interpersonal skills is an essential part of the entrepreneurial journey with a particular focus on skills such as;
Consequently, it’s rare to find successful entrepreneurs who haven’t committed themselves to the benefits of?life-long learning. The most successful entrepreneurs realise that it’s not about amassing random knowledge or memorising copious amounts of information. It’s about turning what they absorb into strategic action.
Many commentators have described how??“We’re all born with a natural curiosity. We want to learn. But the demands of work and personal life often diminish our time and will to engage that natural curiosity.”??(John Coleman)
The most successful entrepreneurs simply make time to learn.?They recognise their importance. They understand that smart goal setting means increasing our learning agility, or our ability to take knowledge from one concept and apply it to another.
No matter where you are on your journey, turning to a community of like-minded individuals can help make learning fun and exciting. By working with that community of entrepreneurs alongside a great coach/mentor entrepreneurs are able to learn from one others’ experiences and provide value to those others in return.
For many entrepreneurs the benefits of working with an experienced growth expert with the additional support and encouragement from a small community of like-minded entrepreneurs with similar challenges are invaluable.
Consequently if One to One coaching/mentoring isn’t right for you and your business at the present time then one of our group coaching/mentoring programmes will almost certainly be the key to unlocking your business’ true potential.
Whether your business is already well-established and looking to re-align its strategic priorities in search of its next growth phase or is still in its early stages we’ve got a suitable group programme that will address your specific challenges and needs.
Across all of our programmes you’ll benefit from unrivalled;
Virtual Boardroom
If you’re already a successful CEO or Managing Director of a well-established organisation we know how important it is for you and the organisation that you make decisions decisively and more importantly get them right.?
Maybe the magnitude and complexity of decisions, particularly strategic ones, is becoming more difficult? Maybe the pressure for bigger and better results year after year from shareholders and stakeholders is increasing? Maybe the competitive market challenges are increasing and threatening your traditional market-leading position? Alternatively – maybe despite your best efforts you’re struggling to create that market-leading position?
If any of this sounds familiar then our?Virtual Boardroom?Programme?is specifically designed to help you navigate these complex decisions. You’ll be part of a confidential advisory group made up of your peers from other successful local organisations.
Led by one of our growth experts you’ll work together to solve the ever more complex and challenging problems in your business and identify opportunities to build both existing and new revenue streams.
Scale Up Institute
If you own or run one of the 36,000+ Scale up organisations in the UK that’s focused on consistently growing your business by more than 20% per annum then you’ll be acutely aware of the challenges of maintaining these growth rates.
Maybe you’re struggling to access suitable talent or the right sort of peers to fuel future growth? Are you struggling to establish the right infrastructure in the business? Maybe it’s a problem of access to the right markets be it here in the UK or indeed overseas? Maybe it’s also a problem of access to the?right?sort of funding so that you don’t lose control?
Having helped multiple Scale-Up organisations our?Scale Up Institute?Programme?is specifically designed to bring groups of ambitious scale up entrepreneurs together to provide a valuable peer to peer experience that is focused on ensuring you maintain your impressive growth rates.
We hope that you’ve found today’s blog useful and informative.?DON’T MISS?the fourth and final part of this mini series about creating consistent levels of growth. In our next blog we focus on the importance of expert advice alongside the benefits of peer to peer support.