Building your Business Infrastructure

What I get to do is a walk in the door and sometimes I have a very short amount of time to do this, I have to walk in the door and identify, where's the weakness? Where's the gap? Where's the hole in their system? What's working and what's not? What do we need to do to fix it, and how do we course-correct it? And this is to get the company to that next phase financially while bringing everything into alignment. I like doing that and it’s fun. That's challenging for me since it keeps me in business because I know that 98 to 99% of people in business do not have a plan, they don't have a game plan. So this keeps me busy, and that's good. However what I'm here to do, and where my heart is, is in teaching you how to lead yourself. With the right support and strategy, you can effectively lead yourself, lead others, and then lead the leaders.?

One of the anchor things that I do for my clients is to help make sure they have the right infrastructure when it comes to mapping out their business. It's the foundation of what should be an infrastructure for your business. In line with this, there's one more thing I want to talk to you about. When it comes to the different phases of business, there’s just so much more to take into consideration. Businesses get to a point where there's a level of maturation or maturity, right? I'm going to talk about maturity, and then I'm going to talk about complacency.?

When a business reaches maturity there are other people that compile data. By most data compilers, a business that has reached maturity is considered to have reached seven figures. And they've got a system, they've got a process, they've got a procedure, they're onboarding their clients, their things are just kind of moving forward at a comfortable clip.?

So think for a moment about a big ship, a big ocean liner, that’s out in open waters. It's a big ship carrying a lot of cargo, it's not going to move fast, it's moving steadily, right? There's a current that is helping move it. And here's the thing, when businesses reach maturity, there's something else that kicks in and it's called complacency. Status quo thinking kicks in and things can become complacent.

Now, does that mean a big business or a small business always needs to change? No. You don't have to change on a dime. You don't have to do what I call quick pivots. When you have a larger company or mature company, think of the ship in the ocean. If people become complacent and if conditions around them change, but they're just still always doing what they've always done, eventually that ship may not get to where it needs to go, right? There's a point after maturation where a company either needs to rebirth itself or it'll go into decline.?

That being said, a company that will rebirth itself even at a large mature level, they eventually will go back in and take a look at what's relevant, what's working, what is our profit center, and then instead of doing a complete overhaul, they practice a technique of 1%. There's a Japanese term called “Kaizen” and it just has to do with the impact of a 1% adjustment that can potentially change your trajectory. So when a mature company realizes that they're complacent, their fork in the road is rebirth, or let it go into decline.?

The decline is not good because usually, that means their company will go out of business. Rebirthing will often take them down a pathway where they can add to the profits of the company, the stability of the company, make it more relevant, more current, rebrand, sometimes uplevel their brand to stay current, and then a lot of times they create an exit strategy to sell and that's the ideal way to go.

Debbra Sweet?

Speaker. Author. Performer. Strategist.

Founder of Thrive Right Consulting

& Sweet Marketing Solutions

www.debbrasweet.com