You take your business seriously don’t you? Of course you do, or you wouldn’t be running it – you’d be taking the easier option and working for someone else. So does that mean you have to work all day, every day and never take any time off? I was caught in a conversation with someone recently who took exactly that view, but I’m not so sure. You have to be seen to be working hard to be taken seriously. The basic argument put forward in favour of never truly … [Read more...]
How do you join the scale-up club?
A scale-up is a business that has grown by at least 20% in either turnover or staff for three consecutive years. The 2017 Annual Scale-up Review form the Scale-up Institute identified 31,440 scale-ups in the UK (out of a total of 5.7 million businesses, 99% of which are SMEs) – so it’s a small and elite club. But why is being a member of the club important? The Scale-up Institute has quite rightly identified that nurturing scale-ups has the potential to make significant improvements to … [Read more...]
How to remain ahead of the game in a competitive market – The OODA Loop
Uncertainty is a fact of life in any competitive business environment, but the proactive business leader doesn’t fear uncertainty; he recognises it and deals with it better and faster than the competition. A business that doesn’t react to change and uncertainty can’t remain competitive for long; the often-quoted example is the demise of Kodak. Having invented the technology for digital photography they didn’t recognise the disruption this would cause to the market and their dogged focus on wet … [Read more...]
