In a previous post I talked about how to capture the power of a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) to unite your team and grow your business. If you haven’t read that post, it can be helpful in understanding the rest of this post.
A BHAG is achieved through a system of processes that facilitate the daily activities of a company. Instituting these systems is a main component of growth. This game plan encompasses all of the necessary components that need to function together in order to turn a BHAG into a reality.
Leadership is required to envision and design this game plan of systems. The passion must be behind the BHAG, because it serves as the motivation to put in the work necessary to grow.
When we think of growth, we need to think beyond the bottom line. As I shared in my first post, sustainable growth isn’t achieved in the bottom line, a healthy bottom line is rather a result of achieving balanced growth. Growth is achieve by laying a groundwork and cultivating a culture that is focused on a measurable goal that is within sight, but just beyond reach.
Smart Growth
Smart growth isn’t accidental. Smart growth is scalable. Scalable growth requires systems and processes.
As Michael Gerber, author of The E Myth Revisited, puts it “think of your business as thought it were a prototype for 5,000 more just like it.” Capture what makes your business great in a repeatable process.
This process can then be extended beyond you and your team. It can be extended to a new branch, a new department, or even just a new employee. By taking the way you do business out of the heads of you and your internal team and placing it on paper in a system, you have the ability to scale your business beyond your current capacity.
Inbound Marketing Methodology
Let’s look at marketing as an example, we are an inbound marketing agency after all. Adopting the inbound marketing methodology into your marketing mix can provide a system of activities that can be scaled as the business grows.
The process of writing blog posts, using calls to action, building landing pages, and sharing killer offers is a process that can be repeated.
The frequency can be scaled to meet desired results. If three blog posts per week is generating 1,000 monthly visitors and 3% of those visitors are converting into leads, then by increasing the frequency of your blogging you will be able to predictively scale the number of leads you generate through your website.
Takes a Team
No single person can have the skills and experiences necessary to design these systems and pull them all together. That attempt alone would defeat the purpose of the exercise.
Smart leaders surround themselves with people who are smarter than they are. By building a trusted team of internal people and strategic external partners, a business owner can unite everyone around the BHAG and together put a scalable plan in place to get everyone moving toward where they want to go.