So, you want to build an empire?
How do you grow your business to multiples of 10 of your one year revenue? From $10million (GHS 40million) to $100million, to $500million and ultimately to a billion dollar company, enough to transform a sector of Ghana's economy?, to a size that creates sustainable wealth for your shareholders and other stakeholders?
Today, Ghana as a country has no domestic multi-billion dollar companies that dominate any industry and that is a problem that ultimately means wealth-creation will continue to be severely restricted. For chief executives and senior management, the challenge of figuring out how to grow your business is further exacerbated by the throng of people with little or no experience in business going into politics and in the process becoming a further hindrance when they are not able to formulate supportive regulations and tax regimes.
The fact is a lot of domestic family-owned businesses will not be around 10 years from hence as more well-capitalized and well-run global companies move into markets in the sub-region and take advantage of opportunities locally. For domestic corporates, the outcome is not going to be any better. The only way to survive then might be either to sell to external companies or continually get into a game of survivalship with no potential for growth, always transitioning from one industry to another.
For business owners and shareholders, the ultimate solution really is to grow to a size where the business becomes a significant player in the respective global industry. Unfortunately, there is not a single Ghanaian company that has done that today and that is a problem for the country.
That is the problem that I and the partners at Songhai decided to launch The Practice School Entrepreneurship Ventures to work with companies to transform them into larger companies able to dominate the markets they compete in.
THE BIG PROBLEM
A company is not going to grow multiples of ten and become an engine of wealth-creation for its stakeholders if it has no big problem it solves. Many businesses are usually launched because of an opportunity that exists in the marketplace. However, over the course of a company's life, if all the company is about is addressing a market opportunity without becoming a products company with well-defined big problem it solves, then it is going to stagnate for quite a longtime.
Defining the big problem and bringing clarity to it for your company is a first step.
MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY
Once there is clarity on the big problem your company focuses on, how do you address it better than your competitors, both domestic and external?
As a senior executive, your success in leading your company to perform better than your competitors depends on your ability to build a management philosophy that is captured in supporting management processes and systems that are unique enough to allow your employees to outperform their peers.
Billion dollar companies and especially Fortune 500 companies have distinguishable management philosophy that are never developed through training but rather bringing in external seasoned managers with large organization management experience to help put that in place. That is the core of the level of discipline that is needed to attack that big problem.
A SALES COMPANY
The core challenge in transforming a business on a path to become a billion dollar company rests on what happens in the field and the hand-to-hand combat in the customer acquisition game. Most companies erroneously assume that getting sales people to be effective means subjuecting them to hours and hours of sales training. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Sales, beyond selling, to sales operations to market strategies needs to become a character of the company. This is where the partners at Songhai believe that a corporate apprenticeship through our Practice School program has the potential to help any executive create a sales core for their company.
THE BIG DEALS
When you transform your company into a sales company, you set yourself up for the big deals, both domestic and abroad.
Companies have been made or broken by either big deals they won or big deals lost. The actual design of the taxonomy behind how resources are allocated in the field and the supporting ecosystem are what is going to get the big deal discovered and done. Until that is in place, your company is never going to execute at the level required to deliver multiples of ten of your revenues today.
INNOVATIVE ADVENTURES
Ultimately the growth that delivers your company to a billion dollars size has to be delivered by the unique value your solutions to the big problem puts into customers hands. That naturally means a continuous value delivery to customers as part of a relationship in the marketplace. Delivering value upon value also requires innovating continuously from product version to product version, and from new revenue source to new revenue source.
We specifically created our 2-year membership program for the Practice School to allow companies who become members an opportunity to nominate senior leaders and managers to go through our entrepreneurship program. This gives your organization a platform to be mentored by seasoned business leaders and have access to a community of entrepreneurs focused on innovating new product narratives for companies.
A BOARD THAT DELIVERS
Ultimately your go-to-market strategies and transformative programs are going to go through your company's board and there is no other place value is destroyed or created for shareholders more than in the board room.
Your corporate board is the key to unlock the big value traps you have both inside and outside the company. Most Ghanaian state-controlled companies, for example, have either lost their fortunes or have wasted a lot of investments that went into them because they possess, what I call, funeral committees for boards. Members with little or no relevant corporate experience have been appointed to boards and in the process take up space not able to offer significant help to management.
In one of the startups I was involved, Satya Nardella, current CEO of Microsoft was on the board. The passionate discussion he engaged management on, the technical details about product decisions and the introduction to key angel investors and setting us on the path to being acquired, is truly exemplary. That demonstrates the type of value you should expect from your board if you're going to transform your company into a billion dollar company.
Do not play games and politics with your board appointments else significant opportunity to create wealth for yourself and your shareholders will be destroyed. It is for this reason that we make the partners at The Songhai Group available as proxies to sit on boards that either you are a significant shareholder or have significant stake to make sure the wealth you seek gets created.
As a senior executive who is serious about growing your business, you cannot afford to engage in a guessing game around what it takes to grow your business to significant multiples, but one thing you can do is to begin on a path to figuring out what it will take. That is where we come in.
Comments