Customizing Your Growth Strategy and Exit Plan for Your Business
Insights and Strategies from a 25-Year Business Veteran
Join Dan Smits, founder of Growth Point Partnership, as he shares his real-life experience and expertise on successfully scaling businesses. Discover the importance of intentionality, strategic planning, team building, and marketing in the scaling process. Learn from a compelling case study and find out how to take your business to new heights.
What You’ll Learn
- How to create a solid business plan and budget for scaling
- What strategies you can implement for building a team and leadership culture
- Why consulting can impact business growth help you avoid common pitfalls
Ready to take your business to the next level? Contact Dan Smits at [email protected] or visit growthpointpartnership.com for more information and resources to help you succeed in your scaling journey. Don’t miss out on the Partners in Growth podcast for valuable insights and strategies. Subscribe today!
Dan Smits: Growth Point Partnership presents Partners in Growth Podcast. I’m Dan Smits, the founder of Growth Point Partnership. With 25 years of owning and operating four businesses and being involved with those businesses of two acquisitions and successfully exiting two of those businesses, we know what drives growth and kills growth. I’m currently operating two businesses that helped me to be able to give you real live experience on navigating through these different topics. Let’s dive deep into customizing your growth strategy, which will build enterprise value and puts you in the driver’s seat for whatever obstacles come your way. And also when you exit, you can exit successfully and on your own terms. We are entrepreneurs, hands-on experience, and we’ll provide insights into the challenge and the hard work that’s involved in starting and growing businesses from scratch. It’s all about determination and grit. Today in the Partners in Growth podcast, we’re gonna dive into successfully scaling your business.
The importance of scaling for business growth is that you have to have different things in mind in a business plan, understanding how you’re going to scale and what is the purpose of scaling at this point. You can just simply grow and let things organically kinda morph into whatever happens. But scaling a business to me is intentionality around putting together a business plan, knowing what you’re going after for that actual scaling and what that actually is determined of a percentage that you’re looking to scale, your margins, you’re really laying out the foundation for scaling. You’re building a team that you’re gonna scale with. You explain in that business plan and throughout this process how critical the marketing and sales processes, you’re trying to avoid pitfalls through this whole process, you’re scaling responsibly and sustainability wise, you’re making sure that you’re holding true to a budget, you’re scaling with different services based on what your plan is, you’re actually working through kind of your own case study as to how this is developing and what are the pitfalls so you can learn from your next stage of scaling. And scaling can go on forever, as long as it’s intentional through this plan. So let’s dive in to some scenarios that we can help you to be able to say, how do I attack a business plan regarding scaling your actual business. So defining what scaling means in the business context. So I am going to scale this business through adding on some new services, redoing my website, rebranding myself from a standpoint of how I talk about my business and what those particular services are that we’re trying to mature up possibly in this scaling process that we’re trying to go after larger clients or more sophisticated clients that will allow us to be able to support a higher margin for our particular business.
So we’re really getting into let’s lay out what it’s going to cost us to scale. So the first thing is the plan towards why am I scaling? Putting together a budget and then laying the foundation for scaling, putting together an org chart, a solid business plan that rolls it all together. And you’ve got to have an integrator. You’ve got to have a person that is running the overall project towards leading specific meetings. You’re going to be intentional about certain types of huddles that keep you guys accountable to the scaling of the business. So discuss the significance of the hiring and retaining the right talent. So you really work in this business plan of who’s on the bus, who is that salesperson, who is that integrator that I spoke about, who is the visionary of the scaling. So all of this comes together to be able to put together an effective leadership process and culture around the scaling of the business. And explain then how the marketing is going to play into this, of what are some ideas relating to how we’re gonna talk about the business and be able to put together a video maybe that we’re going to critique internally as to why we’re moving forward with this it might be a video that never is shared with anyone else, but it really articulates and it’s something to go back to be able to say this was our initial starting point and reflecting on where we’re going with all of this and keeping track of What are the marketing campaigns that we’re doing how we track those marketing campaigns? From a standpoint of SEO and overall, if we’re gonna do Google ads, if we’re gonna do Facebook ads, what are those things that are gonna help us to message those particular areas to be able to get our mission out there? Are we gonna do a case study or a press release to be able to talk about these different things relating to marketing? And then avoiding the pitfalls, meaning making sure that we are staying on track, because there’s nothing worse than when you have a plan and then the people around you, the team members, they see you not moving forward or not planning through this particular plan of executing. So they start reflecting that you are really not committed to this project. So making sure that there is that leader, and if you’re that leader, making sure that come hell or high water, you are following through and you’re continually retooling and fixing anything that’s in the way to make sure that you’re succeeding. You’re looking at different markets potentially that you wanna enter or types of. businesses that maybe you haven’t tackled before, like professional services industry. Maybe you’re in B2C right now, working with plumbers, electricians in the trades, but maybe you wanna move towards the B2B side of things, of businesses that work with straight up other businesses. So let’s dive into a case study around a client that I have that was struggling to be able to determine what scaling meant. And it was because the owner of the business had been in the business for 40 years, very entrenched in the industry, and really driven towards the trade that they’re in, and was really, really good at the trade. But sales and marketing and leadership kind of fell behind. And how does this particular owner at that age scale? They leverage people within the family to be able to really step up to the plate. And those family members have to be willing to come to the plate. And in this case, there was one particular family member that was very capable, but the business owner just was not allowing that person to really be at the helm. So that person was promoted to being the COO and really took an active role towards marketing and sales, joined networking groups, put together a sales presentation process. They had a showroom. They would have people that go to their house, they’re in the trades that they would go through this process of you know, selling a product and service relating to their business. So that particular CEO that was a family member took the role on of scaling the business. And the business owner came alongside because he saw that there was so much energy behind this person in the plan. And then the other people that were on the bus, because his ultimate goal is to be able to step away or transfer that business to the family members at some point. So once that COO started getting leverage behind what they were doing, it really started to catapult. And I came alongside of them to help them through this process, as I’ve scaled several businesses, and it really feels good.
Once you get to the end of that, or it never ends, right? You continue to scale businesses. But in this case, what does good look like to that point that COO now can take an active role as a CEO and that business owner can start stepping away because they’re in their 60s and there just wasn’t a plan before. So in this particular business, they were able over a year to be able to put together that sales process, financial plan, you know, the marketing side of things, training these people in the industry to take over from different skills that the owner had. And this COO put together and orchestrated this whole process to be able to consistently every month see a plan toward success of continuing to see those numbers growing and it was building huddles among the team, building a team approach of a monthly meeting, having quarterly meetings about the whole scaling process, having an annual retreat, going on a training you know trip that reward for hitting certain goals. So it’s very deliberate. And now that business is continuing to grow. The COO is becoming the CEO, as I mentioned, and it just continues to move in a positive direction. Now, as they go to their next scaling of maybe buying another business or looking at moving locations, or having multiple locations for their showroom and their team members to be able to be spread out throughout Minnesota or in the Twin Cities area where we are, that then all becomes possible because that muscle towards planning and being able to scale their business is there. It’s something they know how to do. And now that business will be continue to be successful as long as that integrator, the COO, continues to find vision and opportunity towards building that team and holding them accountable. So when you scale your business and you plan through it, like in this case, the value of their company has gone up by over 100% during this period of time. Of course you gotta prove out that particular scaling and growing now for at least another couple years because they always say you need three to five years of an example or case study be able to support the numbers as to what a person would be paying for the business. And they might not sell this business in three or five years, but at least they are able to sustain wealth from this business because they put the plan in, executed on it. So what is your scaling ability? What is your team that’s going to move you in that direction towards scaling your business beyond your belief? So if you as a business owner have struggled with scaling, there’s nothing better than walking alongside of a consultant that helps you to be able to move in that direction and put together this whole planning.
So at GrowthPoint Partnership, we work as fractional COOs coming alongside of business owners to help them through scaling and other types of projects that they just don’t know how to execute on. And in our case, we have found that there is a return on investment of three to seven times what they invest in the consulting or in our case, the fractional COO and business services to really catapult and move them in the right direction. Like this case study that I was mentioning of in the trades, there’s a return on investment of right now about four times what they’ve spent for our services. So if you’re looking for help in moving forward, contact Dan Smits at dan at growthpointpartnership.com and our website is growthpointpartnership.com and our show notes will be able to get you other contact information and information on this podcast if you want to review it with your team or reach out to us. Thanks for listening to Partners in Growth podcast. Dan Smits from GrowthPoint Partnership. Check it out. See ya.