Having worked closely with high growth SMEs over the past decade, Todd Davison, MD of Purbeck Insurance Services, the UK’s only provider of personal guarantee insurance, knows more than most, the key ingredients to take a business to the next level:Overall:
- Have a clear vision – all high growth SMEs have a well-defined mission and long-term goals, which guide decision-making.
- Dynamism – don’t be afraid to pivot or experiment, using lean startup principles.
- Data focus – track KPIs religiously and use dashboards to monitor performance in real time.
- Strong culture – harbour a strong culture to build staff engagement/brand ambassadors. Also define values early and use them in hiring, onboarding, and performance reviews.
- Customer focus – Obsess over customer feedback and iterate quickly
Focus on Finance:
- Rolling forecasts/budgeting – Monthly or quarterly forecasts help an SME stay agile and reallocate resources quickly.
- Scenario Planning – Model best/worst/expected cases to prepare for uncertainty.
- Cash flow management – manage cash flow well and tightly to determine any funding requirements ahead of time
Invest in People:
- Hire ahead of the curve – invest in senior hires ahead of the curve to pre-empt growth of the business or expansion where additional expertise is required
- Fractional talent – Leverage the use of CFOs, CMOs, CTOs on a fractional basis to bring in part-time experts to help bridge the skills gap and help to manage the costs associated by doing so on a fractional basis
- Leadership coaching/training – Make sure senior leaders work with coaches to scale their leadership as the business grows.
Stick to the core principals in achieving high growth:
- Hire for tomorrow – bring in people who can grow into the next stage, not just fill today’s gap.
- Stay close to customers – as a business scales, keep leadership involved in customer conversations and iterate to consistently improve the customer journey/experience
- Don’t scale chaos – try and identify and fix broken processes before scaling or look to improve optimisation/efficiencies before scaling.