How to sequence the growth of your company? How many stages has your company gone through so far? In this nugget, I am talking about various stages from startup to maturing and specializing – all the way to the point of scaling up and preparing for a transfer of the business to new leaders one day.
I’m telling a bit of my own story along this way to illustrate my thoughts on this growth sequence.
I’m Curious
- What is your story about how your company or organization has grown?
- What stage are you in now?
Transcript
Greetings, Dr. Stephie here. I want to briefly discuss how to sequence your company’s growth in this nugget. Now, I want to tell a bit of my story.
Initially, in 2005, my company was a startup. Like with all business owners, in the startup phase, it’s about figuring out which problem you will solve for whom.
You probably know by now that I’m a recovering Ph.D. chemist. I was working in research and development, and my initial reason for going into business, which is still important to me, was to help scientists and innovators commercialize their innovations. I realized there was such a gap between science and innovation on one side and the business world on the other. There was a big gap between them, which we were not trained to bridge or overcome as scientists or innovators. I had, over the years, learned quite a bit about that. I wanted to bring that skill to innovators and inventors who had done cool things. I did not want them to fail because they didn’t have that knowledge. The fact that we’re not taught those skills in school is a systematic issue in our educational system.
About three years later, the second stage happened. I was put into the position to turn around a business. I didn’t know it was a business turnaround when I accepted this opportunity. I only knew it was a high-tech company I was asked to run. This work began in late 2008. Soon, I realized I had the skills to work with a team and turn around a high-tech company. The economy in 2009 was quite bad, but we raised revenues by 41% in the first year.
From there, I learned how to do executive coaching and went through a year-long program. I gained another skill, which I used with all the others I had already acquired.
My story illustrated what happens to all of us: We start someplace and then add more skills to it.
What happened next? With the help of my dear friends and marketing extraordinaires Irene Donelle and Robert Donnell, it occurred to me what I had been doing all along: I always was pulling knowledge and wisdom out of the person I was working with, laid it before them, helped them see it with fresh eyes, and then assisted them in doing more with it. We named that Brilliance Extraction.
From there, it became the process became a system called Brilliance Mining. This three-step process looks at what “brilliance” (experience, expertise, and wisdom) a person has and which expertise areas are most worthwhile to extract and polish and make visible and actionable for other people.
In other words, what knowledge transfer is most important to you right now?
It became my specialty, and I added a new brand, The Brilliance Mine, to my company. My original company is still called Top-Notch CEO. Brilliance Mining™ rapidly gained traction, and thus, it made sense to form a new brand with a website and all that is involved.
Refining your niche and rebranding is common for a business. As a business matures, the owner/s get even clearer about what they’re meant to be doing. The process involves something that we call “mucking about with intent.” This is something that Robert Donnell and I came up with. He came up with a “mucking about,” and I threw in the “intent.”
That’s how it happened with my company. The Brilliance Mining work was originally strictly one-on-one. Then I realized I had to take my own medicine and leverage the “brilliance” and skills I had developed. I built a Brilliance Mining™ course and launched it last year. I ran several cohorts through it so far and got feedback. We produced amazing results.
By now, I have published almost one year’s worth of Brilliance Nuggets. I’ve built a base of supporters and people who get it now. They know what this work is about and refer people to my company. This is wonderful.
I’m sharing this story to inspire you about a business’s different phases in its growth. Now, as business becomes better than ever, you can invest some.
You don’t just stick it all in your pocket and celebrate that you made a lot of money. But you want to invest in yourself and your business and scale up. A lot of time, you’re testing what works. That’s where the “mucking about with intent” comes in. How do you, for example, draw people to your course and your facilitated course? Which is the vehicle to expand that work? Over time, I will train other facilitators to run some of the cohorts. That’s how we increase the impact of this work and make it eventually also transferable. After all, that is what I teach, and I need to implement it for my business.
You pioneer how to market what you have, and then, only then can you scale it. You have to understand how to market your products or services successfully. Handing this part over to a marketeer who knows it all is tempting. You have to hand them a bundle of money, and they will take care of it. Unfortunately, that’s not quite how it works! I think you need to try out some new things, and you will encounter many different marketing approaches. You try various things, whether that’s LinkedIn marketing or 3D ads attached to YouTube videos. Allow yourself to test these strategies without making a risky investment. Make some moderate investments and see what happens because it’s impossible to foresee all the things that might or might not happen. There’s a sequence to that.
You probably would not invest in trying out new marketing strategies once you have learned how to articulate what you offer. No marketer can completely do that for you. In the best case, you collaborate with a marketer who takes the time to understand what you do and helps you think it through. The marketer becomes a coach, advising you on approaching your market best.
I’m good at figuring out how to articulate what somebody else’s doing in such a way that their target market understands and buys in. I see what is special. But it’s much harder to do this for my business. Almost everybody is in that boat.
That’s my nugget for today: How to sequence your company’s growth. I would love to hear your story. Drop me a line.
Dr. Stephie
P.S.: I appreciate you commenting and sharing this with others. Thank you!
