Is growth about to kill your manufacturing business?

Our firm recently sponsored a business lecture by Doug Tatum, author of No Man’s Land, a survival manual for growing midsize companies. Tatum was a compelling speaker at our event and his book brings insight and clarity to the challenge of business growth. You can bet many of the business owners and leaders in our audience understood the seemingly counter-intuitive problem Tatum spoke about:

Growth can kill your business.

As Tatum convincingly documents in his book, scaling up a business is dangerous work. Sooner or later, every adolescent business will enter a no man’s land where money for essential, next-level growth runs out and entrepreneurial zeal alone will no longer see your business through. Tatum’s message resonates with business owners who are looking for venture capital, or who are thinking about near term growth and personal exit strategies. But that is not the larger audience for this message. The larger audience, those others who were also leaning forward in their seats during our event, were the business CEOs and managers who simply wanted to take the right steps to lead their companies forward. And the advice Tatum had for these business leaders was this:

Money is not the most basic challenge facing you.

You have to manage and lead your business based on what Tatum has documented to be the three prerequisite determinants for successful growth: 1) market alignment, 2) management, and 3) a clear economic model.

Get these three steps right and the money will follow.

But you have to get the first step right – market alignment – if you want to grow. And in our experience, getting the first step right is very difficult for industrial manufacturers, because what owners and managers are typically best at is NOT marketing. They are great at engineering. They are great at machining and operations. They understand the measurable, how-to workings of their electromechanical endeavors. But when it comes to “market alignment” these come across as nebulous and useless terms, because in the owner or CEO’s experience, no VP of marketing, no “marcom” manager has ever convincingly defined for them the process of market alignment.

Market alignment will remain a vague and meaningless concept for industrial manufacturers especially, so long as the process for achieving market alignment remains undefined for them. If you are a manufacturing firm challenged to bring to market a highly engineered product, and you are worried about how to make the transition through “no man’s land” to help your company grow, then it’s time you took the first step.

Don’t let anything or anyone stop you from adding the skill set your business requires, in order to take that first step.

jb
www.centrifuge-now.com