Questions on Scaling-up Part 2

The second set of Questions by Leadership Team members of the Businesses we are coaching on reading Start to Scale by Verne Harnish as a warm-up to a deep-dive immersion with him as part of RYD Community EXPAND Event on 15-Jan-25:

Q1. How do I make people down the stream, understand the vision and have faith in this journey?
This would need you to grow in 3 ways:

a. Leadership Depth: Have unshakeable belief and faith in the shared Vision (Purpose) and the journey that every conversation you have with your people is alive with the passion for creating a. new future in alignment with this vision that leaves your people touched, moved and inspired. This requires strengthening of Communicating Powerfully in the World of Others leadership depth muscle. 

b. Business Excellence: 
i. Monthly Meetings with all the People Leaders month on month to transfer the DNA of the Founder and the senior leadership team to all people leaders in the business
ii. Vision Summary implementation for everyone that gives clarity to each team member in the business how what they are doing is contributing to fulfilling on the Purpose of the business.
iii. Gamifying the journey, one quarter at a time.

c. Craft Mastery: Deep commitment to learn and grow across Leadership Depth, Business Excellence and Domain Knowledge to be the world's best in your industry in order to make a massive difference to your customers and people.


Q2. How do we build the word called ownership within the team rather than a 9-6 job?
By infusing Purpose and Core Values through the whole organization that people bring their heart, soul and all of their limitless mind's potential instead of just body and part of their mind's intellectual capacity.

When people work for money, heart, soul and mind's full capacity is not engaged.

Make your organisation's Purpose so transformative that people are purpose-inspired and excited to come to work on Monday mornings and are energised by the contribution they are making to their country and all of humanity.

In fact, there's research that says that people live longer if they are purpose inspired. Give your people longer lives by giving them a Purpose that touches, moves and inspires them. For that, the Founder / CEO and the leadership team has to be touched, moved and inspired by the Purpose.


Q3. How should we run an effective 30 min weekly business update ? What should we do before, during and after this discussion?
For an effective weekly meeting, a minute by minute plan is given in Start to Scale - page 109 - as part of Meeting Rhythm chapter. Let's invest our creative energy in innovating products and services for our customers that make a massive difference to them, instead of spending time on re-inventing Business Excellence frameworks. 

Meeting Rhythm is the first Rockefeller that we want to implement.


Q4. How can we define our priorities effectively, how do we determine if the identified priorities are truly the ones that will drive our business scaling efforts?

Every quarter, it's important to have one priority from the People side and one priority on the Process side for balanced growth to scale the business.

Quarterly priorities are defined in alignment with Annual Business Priorities, which are defined in alignment with the 3 Years Goals, which are defined in alignment with the organisation's 10 to 25 years Big Hairy Audacious Goal which is a measurable milestone on the way to achieving the Organisation's Purpose.

​Q5. How can I make the Brand promise a way, without any fear of competition catching up?
Here's how:
i. By understanding what is the Job-To-Be-Done for the customers through customer conversations. What is your customers' greatest needs? What is the #1 job the customer needs you to do for them? And, making that your brand promise.

ii. Make a measurable promise to the customer: What's your measurable Brand Promise? 

iii. Then, tracking and evolving all business processes to deliver on the measurable promise made to the customer.

iv. Keeping a weekly eye on what's happening in the marketplace through a weekly rhythm of collecting and reviewing customer and employee data in the Weekly Strategy Execution Meeting (how to run this meeting is on page 109 in Start to Scale) so that you can respond quickly to the changing needs of the customer. Brand Promise will change in response to the changing needs of the customer.

v. It's important to decide who you want to serve - buyer personas - and, what is each of their measured 'job to be done'? This is THE critical strategy question that determines the rest of your business strategy and execution.


Q6. If a business is stuck at a growth plateau despite following your methodologies, what steps should the leadership team take to identify and overcome the bottleneck?
The scaling-up methodology is an integration of the work of thought leaders in the world of business. In my experience, if businesses don't get results after implementing the methodology, the implementation of the methodology has not been done correctly.

Therefore, the coach, the CEO and the leadership team work hand in hand for the implementation. 

Additionally, it is important for all the people leaders to learn and understand the entire framework because little knowledge is dangerous. That is why we had the Scaling-up Learning Expedition. And, on 7-Aug-25 Thursday and 8-Aug-25 Friday, we are hosting Verne in Gurgaon for a Scaling-up in-person Masterclass to take the learning deeper into the businesses we are coaching.


Q7. Making a brand promise is a huge commitment which requires people, money and time to implement it. So is it ok for a new organisation to start without a brand promise and later figure out what brand promise it can sincerely offer to its customer with full commitment.
Going back to First Principles, 

Revenue is an expression of the difference a business is making to its customers. Greater a contribution a business makes to its customers, higher the customer is willing to pay and more repeat purchases will the customer make.

Profitability is an expression of the difference an organization makes to its employees because Operational Excellence, which results in increasing the profit margin, is a function of a learning, super-performing, nurturing culture. 

Strategy is an action plan to increase the contribution the business makes to its customer and employee communities as measured by Revenue and Profit.

Brand Promise is what the customer really needs, the Job-to-be-Done for the customer.

Research tell us that if we tell the customers what we are going to deliver to them (brand promise) and give a measure of what exactly (measurable brand promise), and go ahead and deliver that exactly as per the measure, that brand is more successful and profitable.

If a new business wants to be profitable and attract more customers, it would make sense for the business to deeply understand its customers and offer them what they really need instead of spraying and praying which is what I see most start-ups do.

As per a Harvard study, 75% of start-ups fail in the first year. As per another study, 90% of start-ups fail in the first five years of their existence. Venture Capitalists work with an assumption of 20% success in their portfolio.

We can make 100% of start-ups succeed if we apply the art, science and math of building a great business by learning with a Beginner's Mind, understanding and implementing across the 3 growth levers - Business Excellence, Craft Mastery and Leadership Depth.

So, it is OK for a new business to start without a brand promise because it didn't know any better but for it to be successful and grow exponentially, the leadership team must learn, understand and implement a measurable Brand Promise that it makes an effort to consistently deliver on. And, that would require learning, understanding and implementing the learnings across the 3 growth levers - Business Excellence, Craft Mastery and Leadership Depth.

It actually is more expensive or more risky to not do a measurable brand promise.


Q8. Understand the Right Things Right Model more deeply, how can we gauge if we are following it correctly?
If revenue and profits are not increasing, and the drama in the business continues, then we know there's a problem in implementation.

Usually, when there is a problem which means revenue and / or profits are not growing or declining, we have a tendency to blame people or the framework.

Whenever there's a problem, we need to take a Sacred Pause for reflection and do a 5-Whys Analysis with all the impacted people to uncover the root cause, followed by a 5-Hows Analysis to innovate a solution.

Problems are great to have because they are opportunities for creativity, innovation and growth.


Q9. How the Financial metrics mentioned will measure healthy cashflow apart from Cash Conversion Cycle which is a KPI?
There are several ways businesses can dramatically improve their Cash Conversion Cycle using Cash Acceleration Strategies, allowing them to fund growth with internally generated cash and freeing them from the grasp of banks and / or investors.

It is best to brainstorm ways to improve cash flow at every Quarterly Planning meeting and pick a related initiative as one of the Top 5 priorities for the quarter for the business to super focus on.

Here are 2 tools for such a brain-storming conversation with the leadership team:

scaling-up_growth_tools_fillable_cash_cash_acceleration_strategies__cash_.pdf
File Size:	89 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

---

scaling-up_growth_tools_fillable_cash_the_power_of_one.pdf
File Size:	71 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

---