So – your company has gone through its first Business Storm Cycle, and come out the other side. You survived the Tornado of hypergrowth and booming sales, and all the chaos that created. You experienced the pendulum swing of the Avalanche, your downturn phase where your costs kept rising and your margins were shrinking. Now you’re in your consolidation phase, and making the necessary changes in your people, processes, and IT systems to get ready [...]
How do you define “start-up?” Think about your answer, because that definition can impact your business in a big way, for better or worse. If you ask most business owners, they’ll tell you that the phrase refers to that period when a new business first introduces its product or service, and begins to sell. I disagree, because I find that definition to be far too limiting. In fact, I’d argue that an enterprise experiences multiple [...]
So you’ve come through the Business Storm Cycle, bruised but still in business. You know that you need to rebalance and realign your people, processes, and IT. If you recognize yourself in that description and you’re reading this now, you’re probably saying, “Yeah, that sounds great. But how can I do it? What are the steps I would have to go through to make that happen in my company?” You may have considered hiring an [...]
IT problems affect every phase of the business cycle. The weaker your IT, the faster your Tornado will be over—and the longer your Avalanche will last. It’s vital that you take advantage of the consolidation phase that follows the Avalanche to address your IT issues. If you don’t, you won’t be able to prepare for your next Tornado. You may not even survive. IT is one of your most powerful tools for making your business [...]
Habits are funny things; good or bad, they can be the making or breaking of a person, or even of a business. What’s learned isn’t always easy to unlearn. My mother, for instance, couldn’t get used to the new arrangement of her kitchen when we moved after years in the same home. Because of that, she wasted a lot of steps and effort trying to do things in the same way that she had in [...]
One of the first cycles you learned about when you were a kid was probably the life cycle of a butterfly. You found an egg on a leaf, took it home with you, and put it in a jar. After a while, a caterpillar hatched out of the egg. It crawled around the leaf, nibbling on it, so you gave it more leaves to eat. Eventually, the caterpillar made a chrysalis. The chrysalis didn’t look [...]
In business, how can you tell when you've hit the Avalanche transition point? You'll have huge revenue, while margins are lower than expected and falling. This is the number-one indicator a company has hit the deceleration transition. In the back office, you've got too many people doing too many things manually, over and over again. Cleaned-up, scalable automation processes have not been applied. Productivity is a big problem. High growth pushes operations very hard. When [...]
I’m often asked how we do what we do. How do we consult with a company, battered by its trip through the Business Storm Cycle, to help put its people, processes, and technology back together? First, we sit down with all the departments – R&D, operations, production, and the back office – in one big room, to go through every single process they are using in each and every department. We talk about what works and [...]
Have you ever created a personal fitness program that backfired? Maybe you decided to lose those love handles and whip yourself into shape. So, you went on a juice diet that left you feeling dazed and starved, and you bought yourself some “magic bullet” piece of exercise equipment guaranteed to work out every muscle in your body at the same time. Sure, it had been years since you’d really exercised, but you pitched yourself into [...]
As the long, gray winter throws in the towel, at last, we’re treated to one of Nature’s finest shows – the arrival of spring – as the cycle of the seasons turns in its predictable and expected way. It’s always a thrill to see the flowers bursting up out of the ground along with the reappearance of butterflies as they come out of their chrysalises – even though we know that winter will inevitably be [...]