Business growth follows a path that, in some ways, resembles a person’s development. There are different stages, each with its own tasks, critical moments and achievements. No stage can be skipped, and none can be tackled effectively on one’s own.
In people’s growth, it is adults who guide the development of the young and care for the elderly. Parents occupy a specific position in this cycle: they stand in the middle, between those they have raised and those who raised them, and for a stretch of the journey they are the point of reference for both.
In business, that role is taken on by the entrepreneur. But there is one important difference compared to the family: the sooner the entrepreneur manages to involve other people to accompany them in this task, the better it is for the company they must lead. A business that relies on a single person remains as fragile as a family without a support network.
What only an entrepreneur can do.
There are decisions that, by their very nature, rest with the person leading the business. Choosing the right team members – the right people, even before the right roles. Establishing the founding principles and values that govern the business, the framework within which all other decisions make sense. And as far as finance is concerned, establishing that the resources to fuel the business are generated through ordinary operations – not through extraordinary transactions, but through well-executed daily work.
This is the part of the cycle that resembles parents laying the foundations:
principles, security, the certainty that the resources for growth are earned,
not found.
What the rest of the team must do.
A company does not grow solely on the entrepreneur’s decisions. It grows when it can rely on a team that works to increase the organisation’s knowledge base, makes the most of delegation processes rather than viewing them as the privilege of a few, and maintains an efficient organisational structure – capable of bearing the weight of growth without crumbling.
It is the same transition that takes place in families when children, having become adults, begin to make their own contribution: they do not replace their parents, but share with them the responsibility of keeping the system running.
Because growth requires a plan.
Here we see the difference between growth that simply happens and growth that is managed. Nobody grows up well by chance: there is always an intention behind it – on the part of parents, teachers, or those who accompany them. Similarly, no business grows healthily unless that growth is supported by a plan: clearly defined objectives, resources allocated coherently, realistic timelines and tools that make it possible to verify the results achieved at regular intervals.
I often use the compass metaphor to talk about management control. It is not the compass that steers the boat in the captain’s place – that remains the task of the entrepreneur and their team. But sailing without a compass, especially during the most delicate stages of growth, means relying on luck. The plan is the course. Management control is the tool that tells you whether you are following it.
Companies that grow in a balanced way are not those that rely on the intuition of a single key figure, nor those that keep chasing events. They are those that, like a family that accompanies its children’s growth with care and intention, give themselves a plan – and use the figures to verify, step by step, that they are on the right path.
This is the second piece dedicated to the ‘Management Control’ side of the Rubik’s cube: following on from J. Harrington’s model for mapping activities, here is another piece to help measure results and make better decisions.
Is your company’s growth supported by a plan – or is it chased from stage to stage?
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