Speaker: Taylor Purkis, CFO, The CFO Centre
Why do most small businesses that have the potential to scale and grow either grow too slowly or fail to grow at all?
Taylor Purkis: The pat answer to that question is to cite three contributory factors that are likely to have been lacking of which one of them, at least one, is likely to have applied and those are strategy whereby there hasn't been one or it hasn't been clearly and coherently communicated enough. That might extend to culture where there's been a lack of identity, or when it comes to the management and workforce that perhaps there was a tendency to to work in silos instead of collaboratively as a team. Now, some, if not all of that is going to make is going to apply to many cases, but not so when the owner has committed or completely subscribed to the idea of strategy plus culture plus team so something else has to have been missing and in my experience, where the aspirations have been clearly set and communicated and there's been a genuine commitment to invest in their people, then there's been a tendency to place too much emphasis in keeping score. So there's a fourth pillar needed to achieving growth to avoid that pitfall,
What is the missing ingredient for fast growth?
Taylor Purkis: so picking up from where I left the last question, it's Business Intelligence, BI, I and what I mean by BI is so much more than a visually compelling set of dashboards. And rather, it's a suite of tools that continually evolve that prompt action decisions to be made that are not only to the benefits of performance in the short term but actually enable longer term goals and aspirations to be met.
What role does environment play?
Taylor Purkis: conventionally environment concerns a combination of policies, procedures and systems to ensure that internal controls are adequate and in the perspective of a growth minded business owner, many of them will sort of reluctantly accept that that's an unavoidable cost of being in business. But in so doing, it's so far removed from their main focus of achieving growth that it's something that only gets their attention when when something goes wrong. So when I'm working with a growth-minded business owner, I seek to shift that mindset from one of seeing perceiving environment as cost to an area that's worthy of investment, to create value that is directly attributable to enabling and achieving achieving growth. So and to do that, it's about putting BI at the heart of everything. So BI actually creates drives, shapes the environment that supports the business and enables it to achieve it's goals
In conclusion?
Taylor Purkis: in summing up, it's difficult to argue against the notion that Strategy plus Culture plus team provides a business with a better chance of realizing its growth expectations. Nonetheless, I would encourage business owners to consider that actually, there's fourth element needed to simply make it happen. And that's Business Intelligence and creating an environment that's shaped/ honed/driven by Business Intelligence, so it's very much more a case of strategy plus culture plus team plus environment with BI in parentheses equals growth.
