Recently, I spoke with John Nelson, a senior information technology executive regarding hyper growth. Our conversation focused on companies emerging from startup mode who desire sustainable growth begin the process but face issues that often lead to imbalance and create stresses on the organization, the people, and even the objectives, as it tries to accommodate growth demands.
Technology has become a key ingredient in the formula to reduce complexity. Mature organizations are heavily invested in end-to-end integration, process automation, advanced business analytics, and operational excellence. This allows them flexibility in handling complex operational and tactical issues while keeping focus on ensuring their strategic plan is being executed effectively.
John said, “In the post-startup company, each team is charged with focusing on their specific requirements, as part of the success puzzle, and leadership’s role is to provide a consistent united front to ensure continuing focus on the prize. Unfortunately, fast growth creates gaps in both awareness and execution. This can lead to overly complex manual processes as stop-gap solutions, in the attempt to ensure sustained growth. Moving in this direction creates overhead, obscures creative processes and innovation, bogs down processes, generates ‘hidden drags’ on productivity, and leads to waste-spend that directly impacts profit”.
Companies moving into a hyper growth phase can achieve the same results as mature organizations, via scalable investments in core areas of process optimization, automation, and systems integration, to accelerate forecasting, revenue recognition, cash management, product development and manufacturing, and human capital management.
What was interesting to me is that John shared a strategy he developed to mitigate the profit impact and enable the company to redirect their efforts, thereby supporting their focus on growth. He did this by introducing enhanced capabilities to integrate disparate systems and reduce the amount of effort required to ensure product quality. This created deeper ties between financial, manufacturing, and quality systems, and simultaneously data quality and the process consistency increased, resulting in a 5% gain by reducing manual inefficiencies.
I found John’s innovative approach refreshing, and thought I’d share it with those of you in a post-startup company as you brace yourself for the next stage in your growth and profitability. John would be happy to discuss his approach.
Contact John Nelson via LinkedIn, Career WebFolio, or email at jjnelson@liquid-amber.net
Listen to the full Podcast discussion below!
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