10 Keys to Exponential Growth

As an entrepreneur, I think one of the most common and difficult challanges is the inevitable transition that occurs when you try to grow beyond your own reach. What I mean by this is that most entrepreneurs start small. Like me, I started in my living room on more than one occassion. Eventually I grew to a small office; then added staff, moved into a bigger office, raised money, etc. The list of growth steps goes on. But there is a moment when you realize that you can't see and certainly can't touch all the chess pieces. You need to let go. This is the difficult transition for many entrepreneurs. Going from small business to real company.

As someone who's been in the middle of this transition for the past 18 months, I can tell you, it's not easy. Over the next few months I'm going to start breaking down what I've found to be the 10 most important aspects of managing this transition and hopefully achieving exponential growth on the other side. In this post I'll share the 10 areas and in future posts, i'll get into details about each one. Please bare with me as this is a work in progress and will surely evolve.

1. Mission, Vision & Values
2. Roles & Responsibilities
3. Recruiting
4. Management
5. Performance Reviews
6. Accountability
7. Strategic Planning
8. Goals & Metrics
9. Financial Visibility & Budgeting
10. Corporate Transparency

So far, i've found these 10 areas to be the most important and have the most positive impact and where I spend the bulk of my time. If anything, this will be an interesting experiment as I apply these 10 aspects of running a company at my current business and in real time, share the feedback of my successes and failures.

Comments

[Pete Kennedy]

Excellent post - I look forward to hearing more details about your future experiences. Do you plan to write a post on each of the 10? I'd be interested to hear your perspectives on each.

[jeffsolomon]

Hey Pete; thanks for the comments. Yes, the plan is to get into detail in perhaps more than one post for each of the 10 areas. The posts may not be linear, but I’ll try to keep them linked together.

[Aaron Ross]

I love the "Corporate Transparency" one! It's vital in a knowledge-based company, where transparency increases trust, improves decisions across the company and enhances everyone's emotional connection to the company (and thus their motivation). But transparency can make experienced managers uncomfortable, since most business people today have been trained to value control and secrecy.