Hey, there it is Mike Cooch and I want to talk to you about putting a growth operating system in place at your business.
Growth operating system
This may be a new phrase to you. Let me explain what it is and why you need one.
The reason that you need this system is that every business needs to grow to be healthy. That’s essentially how we measure the success of businesses these days. It’s growing either in top-line revenue or it’s all about growth and profitability or, ideally, both.
And the reason why that’s so important is that it creates more opportunity and more resources for people to do things.
If you’re a business owner, you want more resources and opportunity. You want to grow as a person and your business helps you do that.
If you’re trying to recruit talent to your company, they want to know that there are growth opportunities for them.
The most important thing for top talent is that they want to know that there’s an opportunity for them to grow personally and professionally. To potentially get more pay and resources that they can manage.
So when you see a business that’s dying it is because it’s not growing. It can’t attract new talent because everybody wants to go to those businesses that have more opportunities.
Thus, a growing business is a healthy business and we want to make sure that we have the ability to get consistent, profitable growth.
Importance of a growth operating system
Why having a growth operating system is important is because of two things.
One, it’s culture.
You got to have the right people on the bus. You got to have people that want growth. Those that are committed to growth and improvements, personally and professionally.
So that they can capitalize on growth and create growth.
Having a culture is so critical. It’s maybe the most important thing at any business.
The second thing that you have to have in place are the right processes and tools to make sure that those people know how to create opportunities and capitalize on opportunities.
Because you can hire a bunch of ambitious people. People who are willing to hustle and work hard but if they don’t know how to find out what are the most important things to work on then it is useless.
Questions like, ‘What are the things that are preventing us from growing and reaching our goals?’, ‘How can we most effectively unblock anything that’s preventing us from growing?’, should be asked by your people.
If not, then you have a bunch of people that are just working really hard and spinning their wheels.
And if you’re an entrepreneur you know exactly what this is like because you and I have a thousand things that we feel like we should be doing at our business every day. There’s an endless number of things that should be improved.
But the reality is you can’t work at all of them. You can’t fix everything and not everything is important to get fixed right away.
There are certain things that if you focus on them, they’re going to have a massive impact on your business. Then there are other things that no matter how much you improve them, you really just kind of spinning your wheels putting in the time and not really making an impact.
That’s not a fun place to be but we’ve all been there. As entrepreneurs, there are a million things going on. It’s easy to get distracted and caught up in fixing things that don’t necessarily need to get fixed.
Measuring importance
So we need to have a process. A set of tools and process in place that will help us do a few things. This is where the growth operating system really comes into play.
The first thing is we need to be able to measure what’s important.
You need to be able to measure importance just like how you want to know whether you are putting on weight or losing weight. You need to have a scale that you can get on every morning wherein you can look at and know that it’s giving you accurate data.
It is the same thing at your business. You need to be able to measure the things that are important to you and your business.
You need to be able to measure daily and consistently so that you can look at those numbers and know if you are on track.
The second thing that you need is that you need a way to make decisions about what it is that you should focus on improving right now.
Again, there are so many things in your business that can be improved. But which ones should you focus on right now? Which has the biggest impact on your business to get the most growth and profitability?
You got to have a way of evaluating that’s not just based on emotion. It has to be based on something that’s more logical. It should be based on data so that you can make sure that you don’t just get caught up in the emotion of your business and then make bad decisions.
Then finally, we need a process for improving whatever it is that we’ve decided needs to be improved. We need a way to collect, evaluate, and implement those ideas at our business so we can make sure that we’re actually driving the right things forward.
A functioning growth system
So that’s three things that will enable you to measure what’s important. You got to have a way of deciding which is important, which ones are we going to focus on right now and put our energy into.
Also, never ever forget that you got to have a process for improving it.
You put those three things in place and you have a growth operating system. A system that you and the other talent that you’re working with can use to make sure that you’re growing consistently and predictably at your business.
