Is your business plateauing or stagnating with growth? Maybe your profitability isn't where you want it to be? Or maybe you feel like your business is growing so fast that you can’t keep up with running it. In this post, I’ll share about value growth advising and how it helps companies find their balance.
I’m Mike Proctor, and I am a Certified Value Growth Adviser. I branched off into these services because I realized, while I was doing financial planning with entrepreneurs, that getting into business isn’t the same as knowing how to run a business. And it can take a while to learn how to run a business that’s balanced. Many times, entrepreneurs know their craft or they know certain areas, but they also know that they can do better.
As an entrepreneur, you know your niche. However, you might not appreciate all the facets that go into business. There are eight core business functions, which are leadership, strategy, marketing, sales, the people aspect of it, operations, accounting, and finance, and all of these functions are critical to business. Usually, if someone is really good in one area, they’ll have blind spots in others—especially when the ownership is concentrated into just one person or just a few decision makers.
If the decision makers are very like-minded, they may not see all functions as being as important or understand how to grow in those areas. This is what holds businesses back from growing into what they could be or what they should be. These under-developed areas might not just hold the business back, but could actually lead the business to failure. In fact, any one of those key competencies can put the company out of business if it is so disproportionately developed compared to the others.
Through value growth advising, the process for evaluating a company is based on scoring each of the eight core competencies. From those scores, we can understand the overall risk profile of your business and use scenario-planning to see what growth you could achieve by increasing proficiency in certain areas. If you develop your financial side or your legal department, for example, it will make your company more reliable, decrease risk, and allow for more natural growth of the business.
Once we have a really clear understanding of your business and your objectives, the second part of our value growth advising process is to take all this learning and information and put it to use. Often, this is as simple as getting departments to talk to one another in a way they haven’t before. Then, we move on to building your company’s vision through a strategic planning process. As a result, employees will better understand what their role is within the context of growth, and you’ll have a better overall path forward.
Since my passion is helping local businesses grow and developing the quality of our community, this is an area I would love to chat with you about. This is a very basic idea of what we do and how we do it, but let’s meet to go more in depth and talk about how value growth advising could help your unique business.