The Best Way To Grow Your Business

By Brad Schow, COO, HTG Peer Groups

The best way to grow your business is to grow your leaders.

All of you choose every day what you will spend your time on in your business. Tactical issues, sales, service tickets, and projects all come to mind. These types of activities are the basic blocking and tackling that have to be done well for a business to succeed. Functional growth, however, takes more than just executing tasks. It takes leadership beyond just you.   

We work with many entrepreneurs. All too often the story regarding these leaders goes like this:

Talented, opportunistic leaders set out to build a company with their own blood, sweat, and tears. Their efforts bear fruit, and they find some success — so much success that eventually they need some help. They hire an employee or two to take some of the work off of their plates. They tell the employees what to do and how to do it. They experience a little more success and hire another employee or two. Again, they tell these new employees what to do and how to do it.

They now have a team of four to six people working hard and making money delivering a quality product. Life is good, and business is better! One day they start to ask themselves, “How long can I keep this up?” They have four to six (in some cases seven to ten — or even 15 to 20) employees who come to them for every decision. They can’t take a few days off without employees getting stuck because they are not around to direct them and tell them what to do. 

Their entire day is full of dealing with issues. Their nights are spent tying up loose ends they didn’t have time to get to during the day. If they have any energy left, they try to think through how to move the business forward. Success is now increasingly coming at the cost of family time or any kind of personal life outside of work.

They try and truly delegate some responsibility to one of the employees that shows some leadership potential. Things go okay for a day or two and then a situation arises. This newly assigned leader makes a slow or poor decision. The owner steps in, corrects the bad decision and cleans up the mess. They decide they must have wrong about the leadership potential of their employee. They move the employee back to their original role and go home wondering if they have the right people on the bus.

Maybe you’re in that situation. Can you find yourself somewhere in that narrative? If so, let me ask you this. What are you doing to identify and invest in your leaders now so that when you need them they are ready? Potential leaders need time to grow into leadership roles. They need to be allowed to own things, decide, and fail. Putting them in these situations and walking with them as they learn requires a deliberate plan on your part.

I challenge you to put together a leadership plan for yourself. That leadership plan should include a way to identify and then train up the leaders you’ll need as you grow your business. We work with leadership teams on crucial skills like effective meetings, planning, having effective conversations, and accountability. Helping your leaders with these skills will pay huge dividends as you grow your business. If you’re interested in what a plan like this looks like or if you have something that works for you that would be willing to share, I would love to hear from you.

The best way to grow your business is to grow your leaders. It will make a difference in your business, in their life and in yours.  

Brad Schow is part of a team of coaches and consultants serving the IT industry. Prior to joining the HTG Peer Groups staff, he spent 20 years helping grow a solutions and managed services provider. His path of technician, service leader, operations leader, president, and partner give him a unique perspective that allows him to relate to a broad spectrum of business challenges. Schow’s company was a member of HTG for many years. He credits much of the success to the peer group experience and the relationships that grew out of HTG.  He loves investing in people, thinking ahead, building teams, and helping others find success. You can reach him at bschow@htgpeergroups.com.