If you are a SMB business model prisoner, you know it.
As a leader, you want to make solid changes which positively impact the trajectory of your small to midsize (SMB) business. However, your current leadership team keeps identifying obstacles to forward momentum.
Then again, you are a visionary leader. As a result, you sailed into the unknown to found your organization, weathering various storms along the way. In addition, you established professional credibility by providing clients with extraordinary, continuous and innovative product and service quality delivery.
Because you remain a visionary leader, you also listen to your gut. Your gut tells you that “what got you to where you are today” is insufficient to turbo-charge your organization to where it needs to go, tomorrow.
Sailing towards the future, you have a nagging sense that “something more” is required to get your business to the next level.
However, your leadership team and managers keep you a SMB business model prisoner.
In fact, your team does not consider themselves imprisoned, at all. To them, your perceptions are yours, alone. They have no problem with the way things are. Or do they?
Yet, each time you propose Change, more naysayers emerge out of the woodwork, don’t they? And they are beginning to make you doubt yourself.
Your leadership team is just fine with the way things are. In fact, they are a little too fine, in your opinion. Now that you sit back and think about it, everyone is very comfortable and, as a result, more than a little complacent with how the current business model keeps things static and stagnant. Or, are they really that comfortable? Possibly, might they share your concerns?
That moment is when you realize yesterday’s business model is a business model for reinforcing the status quo, today and tomorrow.
As that visionary leader, you remain undaunted, seeking continuous edginess. Also, you remain comfortable being uncomfortable. Consequently, you are jazzed about taking informed and vetted risks, while avoiding chasing bright shiny objects. After all, the pursuit of “what’s next” catapulted your business to where it is today. As a result, you will not lose sight of “what’s next” when targeting tomorrow’s customers.
In your mind’s eye, SMB growth, expansion and sustainability are not about preserving yesterday’s systems. From your perspective, SMB business models should be nimble, flexible and open to innovation for future marketplaces, industries and clients.
Everyone becomes a SMB business model prisoner when they take their fingers off the pulse of the entire organization.
Usually – and eventually in enlightened SMBs – there is the epiphany: “How did we get ourselves backed into this complacent corner?” When that happens, small changes making huge impacts are possible.
Mostly, this leadership team epiphany occurs when the rate of customer defection, accompanied by poor sales results, are too great to ignore. In addition, faulty or non-existent processes which are dismissed as insignificant, now are rooted out. Also, the hiring practices which create yesterday’s homogeneous, unengaged workforce are jettisoned. Instead, an enlightened human capital strategy for tomorrow now favors hiring diverse and talented professionals, committed to creating extraordinary client outcomes.
Have I piqued your interest? Wondering what to do first?
For starters, move one millimeter outside your current comfort level. Liberate yourself from being a SMB business model prisoner. Start by reading this 3-part series I created on SMB Business Achilles Heels.
6 SMB Strategic Achilles Heels You will not Address
The 5th SMB Strategic Achilles Heel hobbling You
The 6th SMB Strategic Achilles Heel involves People
Do you recognize any of the scenarios in these articles? Then, isn’t it time we had that conversation? Take the next step. A well-facilitated, round-table workshop rekindles lost innovative SMB mojo. Why remained imprisoned in your current business model?
Catalyze your stalled leadership team. Discover new organizational strengths. Take a seat at the table, instead of trying simultaneously to lead, participate and keep everyone behaving. Contact me today!
Babette Ten Haken serves organizations as a corporate catalyst and innovative speaker, strategist, coach and storyteller. Babette’s One Millimeter Mindset™ Workshops and Speaking programs leverage collaboration to catalyze professional innovation, workforce engagement and customer retention, especially in challenging Industrial Internet of Things environments. Babette’s playbook of IIoT team collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon. She is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association.
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