Enigin Advice - How is your Business Doing?
AT Enigin it very enjoyable to see many people start out in the energy saving business - sometimes it is the new Enigin Distributors first foray into business ownership, for others they are entrepreneurs always looking for a growth industry.
But after you are up and running, whether a serial entrepreneur or new to owning a business, how do you gauge the long-term health of your enterprise?
If someone was considering investing in your business, advisers will point you to the balance sheet: that, they’ll argue, is your companies X-ray. Read it carefully enough and you’ll find any tumors or life-threatening conditions.
So can you judge how you business is doing just by the number? While you should never ignore the numbers, they never tell the whole truth. Great results today don’t mean there won’t be trouble tomorrow.
Diagnostics
When looking at your business, what indicates its health or vulnerability is whether or not it has produced and developed homegrown talent. Has everyone at the top been brought in at that level? Is much of the senior leadership relatively new? How many of the original team is still there?
Any fool can buy talent; only real leaders develop it. Numerous organisations, founded by charismatic individuals, who grew their businesses on the back of their personal flair and reputations. But they never hired people smarter than themselves and they never successfully taught and developed the more junior people around them.
They didn’t mean to, but they put their companies at risk. The failure to develop talent organically put them at the mercy of headhunters and new hires. At best, these were expensive (in time and money); at worst, they entrusted the whole enterprise to strangers. It’s a bad strategy that often crashes.
What does health look like?
By contrast, there are businesses that have taken junior clerks and developed them until they sat on the board. There are also entrepreneurs who start company after company, always taking - and developing - a core team around them. In these cases, the individual’s growth is a function of the company growth and everyone flourishes. Commitment is strong and the leadership has the capacity to exceed the talents of the founder. The business is sustainable.
This is not an issue for HR. It goes to the core of business leadership. If you don’t want to surround yourself with people as driven and more talented than yourself, then you may have started the company - but the biggest problem you face is you.
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