In 2021 my family business hit $60M. In 2014 we made $16M in revenues.
Family businesses are friendly environments. But they rarely overcome the 2nd generation. They don’t adapt their mindset to grow. We scaled the business because we changed our approach.
Here are the 5 biggest mistakes we stopped making:
Lack of Speed.
People focus on preserving the same pace year after year.
We were measuring productivity based on historical performances. The key was to question this idea and start looking for the best performance possible.
Same management for decades.
Every moment of a company needs different management skills.
But we were choosing managers based on experience from the 80s. They didn’t grow fast as the market. When we started to fill management with talented people, revenue exploded.
No delegation.
When you start a business, you do everything. But with a limited amount of time.
As a CEO, I am cursed to be the most skilled person in the room. To grow, this is a limit. I dug for managers more skilled than me to diverge from me. I aligned them with KPIs, not sympathy.
No curiosity about customer needs.
Organizations fail to thrive because they assume they know the customer.
But they didn’t. We started to grow after losing 10% of our revenues. We realized we had lost curiosity, and we began to ask again. Changed perspective.
Fear to explore.
To foster innovation, make small bets. To succeed, believe in them.
The saddest story in our history is about the only patent we developed. The project was outstanding. But we realized only a few sales because we didn’t believe in it. We didn’t have enough managers to place on the new business because we were pressed to exploit the core. No pain, no gain.
We learned it the hard way. What are you doing to grow a business to overcome the years?
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash