3 Warning Signs Your Business Is Growing Out of Control – Technology Trailblazers Podcast #15

On February 18, 2021, Derek Little, the host of the Technology Trailblazers Podcast, invited Michael M. Richardson, the founder and CEO at Tech-Azur, to discuss the ‘growing pains’ and digital transformation challenges that leaders of small and medium-sized businesses should watch out for as they scale.

In this interview, Michael Richardson pointed out three early warning signs for the most common problems and shared some tips on how CEOs can polish their growth strategy with consultancy from a dedicated CTO/COO.

Listen to the full podcast here:

[https://www.podbean.com/ep/pb-n4ejw-13740f6] 

Reaching the Growth Block Point

Most of Tech-Azur’s clients have built their businesses over time and made several successful funding rounds. However, they might reach that stage where some external help is needed to boost their enterprise.

“...what got you here won’t get you there. And we’re about getting you there and bringing in a different way to do it.” – Michael Richardson.

What blockers hold executives from reaching a brand-new stage of efficiency and profitability?

“Very often, people in leadership or executive positions have grown up in the organization. Or maybe the CIO or the CTO developed the first version of the product or helped put together the first ERP system that the company runs on. 

But they often lack the depth of experience in the outside world at times, so they can’t see around the corners.”

So the main blocker is when founders and leaders fail to recognize the blind spots.

3 Common Obstacles for Building an Actionable Growth Strategy

#1 – ‘We need reports!’

Many work teams share such common problems as outmoded legacy systems, disparate technologies, or, in fact, no technology at all.

There are also misleading concepts that hinder their progress: 

“People miss out on seamless collaboration capability as a team. So, very often, these organizations have grown over time in stove pipes without collaborative methods.

So they’re dead-ending the information. The whole process becomes very opaque, and CEOs and CFOs get frustrated because they have this sense: “We don’t really know what’s going on. Why doesn’t everybody know what’s going on? We need more reports!” 

So one of the prime considerations is to bring the information together and share it easily.

#2 – ‘We really need to add some people, but we just don’t have the time.’

Another counter-productive approach that harms business growth is deeming the staff onboarding an undesirable time waster. Quite often, clients confess:

“We can’t stop doing what we’re doing long enough to hire somebody and take the many months of training and experience it takes to get them up to the point where they’re productive. So we’re hiring somebody that will actually slow us down.”

#3 – Distrust Between Departments

The final warning sign is the lack of trust. It’s a common problem when one department doesn’t trust that the other will get work done. So they develop elaborate workarounds just to avoid cooperation with that other department. 

But badgering and pressuring one another with reporting demands to measure the outcome is no good. Instead, work teams must grasp the essence of processes underpinning the outcome.

How Tech-Azur Enables Business Growth for Their Clients

Tech-Azur’s consultants start by assessing the current level before developing a specific plan to transform a company into an agile and revenue-oriented entity. Step One aims to understand the current state of affairs. 

Step Two is to begin synthesizing what the desired future state is. This phase demands broad collaborative work:

“It’s not simply saying, ‘Well, sales should be up, and costs should be down.’ It’s much more nuanced, and it connects with each different stakeholder. So once we’ve done our situation analysis, we use that as our roadmap to begin prioritizing and addressing the obstacles to progress and address those in a structured way.

A key tool that we use there would be improvement events where we’ll get the cross-functional groups together with their stakeholders in a given process and walk them through the process of understanding and instrumenting.”

Wrapping Up

If you’ve noticed any early signs that your organization might have crashed into a growth block, you request a free Tech-Azur’s consultancy today. We have helped numerous SMB companies overcome similar challenges.