How a COO can help your company scale
CEOs often ask whether they should recruit a Chief Operating Officer (COO) to help accelerate growth and scale their business? Typically they've identified a significant market opportunity but are struggling to get the right processes and people in place to take advantage of it.
At best we’ve seen COOs of client companies act like potent partners to the CEO; at worst the COO role has caused confusion and frustration. It's not easy to get the right fit.
COO - will they help your transformation?
We are often asked by CEOs whether they should recruit a Chief Operating Officer to help accelerate growth? These CEOs typically feel that their market opportunity is big. However, they are struggling to get the right processes and people in place to take advantage of it.
Have you stress tested your strategy recently?
Ask most CEOs if their business has a strategy. They will tell you sure – we use such and such a strategy framework. We got our team together and had a strategy offsite. They might even say they have a strategic plan. Most will have a clear ambition or big goal to dramatically improve revenue or profits. However the strategy to achieve this ambition is normally less clear.
Does your team know your strategy statement?
Imagine being CEO of Leinster Rugby and your team not knowing what your strategy is, how long would you keep your job? Like rugby, today’s business environment is fast changing and dynamic.
Five steps to successful strategy offsites
A great strategy offsite leaves fingerprints on the business – a bad one only leaves fingerprints on the glasses in the bar.
Most companies hold strategy offsites. A lot of investment goes into them and expectations run high. But consider your last strategy offsite? Was it just a bonding exercise or did it leave fingerprints on the business?
Build a Business Model Mindset or Die
54% of senior managers favour new business models over new products and services as a source of future competitive advantage. This information comes from a recent global survey by the Economic Intelligence Unit on more than 4,000 senior managers. The general message was “how companies do business is more important than what they do.”
Harnessing the Power of a Growth Mindset
Business cycles quickly characterise CEOs as failures or successes at the growth game. However, building a growth company is a journey not an event. It can be a struggle.
Some will credit or blame the market, the product or the investors – however that is too simplistic. Often the truth is closer to home - CEOs and their teams can choose either a growth or a fixed mindset.
For transformation, first leaders must change
Good leaders change their role during growth transformation programmes. They know that if they don't change themselves, transformation won't happen. Great leaders go through a personal transformational journey as their business grows. Mahatma Gandhi’s famous edict, “For things to change, first I must change” still resonates today.
What is less clear is how precisely the leader’s behaviour needs to change throughout the transformation process. Figuring this out can be tricky. Most are involved in just a few transformations over their career.
Four Key Steps to Building a Better Board
Many CEOs plough the leader’s lonely furrow with an ineffective Board. Others recognise the challenge and build a Board to help achieve their ambitions. Better Boards provide experience based advice and practical assistance. They help with sales, funding, facilitate important business introductions and attract key hires.
Five Pillars for Leading Successful Transformation...
The promise of transformative business growth is alluring. It’s the big jump. The great leaders legacy is successful transformational change. Transformative leaders are not afraid of mistakes. They reward those who are developing new abilities and skills quickly. They help those who are slower on the pick up. They don’t stand on ceremony and most importantly they lead from the front. Successful transformations have five pillars as their foundation.
Five Steps to Becoming Business Growth Transformer...
Many companies grow incrementally. Yet there is a different kind of company that transforms business growth. These ‘Business growth transformers’ have similar characteristics. By taking five integrated steps, companies can set themselves on a path to transform growth.
5 Leadership heroes for growth companies
Growing companies demand a high degree of leadership skill.However the paradox is that they often have less experienced CEOs and have no time to devote to leadership development. Taking some role models and starting a practice of getting regular feedback from colleagues can improve awareness of where to start.
Three steps to a more successful Growth Plan
Most growth plans fail. Much of this failure could be avoided if the process was more rigorous and followed three phases: (1) Assess the current situation; (2) Challenge the team to devise new and innovative strategies; (3) Execute the critical few strategies for growth.
5 ways to ensure your vision inspires change
Many CEOs struggle with crafting and communicating a picture of the future that draws others in. A vision, which expresses how you would like your company to be, brings clarity and excitement. It can align founders, management and shareholders and can become a heartfelt force in a company's soul.
New Approaches to Growth
As the global software sector hurtles towards adoption of cloud, mobile, Internet and SAAS, the Irish indigenous technology sector is at a crossroads. The speed of launching new products, the approaches to acquiring customers and the metrics used to measure success have been altered forever. While many of the challenges in building a technology company remain constant - the approaches to addressing these challenges are changing radically.
In this report we examine five key areas where these new approaches are happening:
- Ways of building products
- Size of markets being competed in
- Finding product/market fit
- Establishing measurable customer value
- Change in approaches to customer acquisition
Shared Vision - Upbeat thinking in a downtown economy
A shared vision lays down, in succinct, compelling terms, what your company stands for, what sets it apart, and what it's striving to achieve. It provides guidance for your team and signposts key goals. Companies without shared vision tend to drift and pull in different directions. They are the first to go in a downturn, when only the fittest survive.
Barriers to growth, Opportunities to scale
With the increasing globalisation in the technology sector, companies need to be of significant size to survive. The Irish indigenous software sector is fragile - as the survey results make clear. To achieve a viable, self-sustaining and vibrant software sector, we need to achieve critical mass, not just in employee numbers or revenue, but in the number of companies that themselves are of significant size in a global context.
