Resources… Too Much, Too Little, Just Right?
You can easily see how not having enough resources can stall growth; but I’ve noticed a phenomenon whereby your growth potential is actually limited by the resources of your organization. While it may be obvious that you can’t grow if you don’t have enough sales people or spend enough on marketing, what I mean is that the actual ceiling, the maximum growth that is even visible to you is limited. This occurrence not unlike the human subconscious; it’s there, it has an impact on you, but you can’t really see it or control it. It is the obscure wedge that blocks your organization from growing; the mere fact that you are resource limited drives opportunities elsewhere and you don’t even know it. You are essentially blind to what you could have gotten.
It’s not as if you have deals that you turn away or that choose to go with a competitor, it’s that these opportunities don’t even present themselves to you. You want to grow, and you might even add resources to take on a big new deal, but you miss out on the full potential of your organization. You don’t even have the opportunity to add resources because you don’t know you even need them. It’s what you don’t know, you don’t know, that you’re really missing, and that’s where the magic occurs in my experience. To access that growth opportunity you need to be a step ahead of it. Herein lies the balancing act. How do you balance adding resources for what you “might” have an opportunity to get, but you don’t know what those opportunities are, without overburdening your organization. How do you stay just slightly over-resourced? How do you have one too many staff? How do you set yourself up to be at the right place at the right time with the right resources? I’m trying to figure that out without either banging my head one too many times or worse, clubbing the heads of my current resources because they aren’t enough; sadly, I do both sometimes.
It’s not as if you have deals that you turn away or that choose to go with a competitor, it’s that these opportunities don’t even present themselves to you. You want to grow, and you might even add resources to take on a big new deal, but you miss out on the full potential of your organization. You don’t even have the opportunity to add resources because you don’t know you even need them. It’s what you don’t know, you don’t know, that you’re really missing, and that’s where the magic occurs in my experience. To access that growth opportunity you need to be a step ahead of it. Herein lies the balancing act. How do you balance adding resources for what you “might” have an opportunity to get, but you don’t know what those opportunities are, without overburdening your organization. How do you stay just slightly over-resourced? How do you have one too many staff? How do you set yourself up to be at the right place at the right time with the right resources? I’m trying to figure that out without either banging my head one too many times or worse, clubbing the heads of my current resources because they aren’t enough; sadly, I do both sometimes.
I completely agree with your statements here. Not only do you commonly face how to grow or when to grow, but where and who to grow. The mere fact that you are growing is success in itself, if you define it that way. Where I currently am not pursuing a vertical we are well prepared for or can easily prepare for. I am all too familiar with the "ceiling" reached from brilliant start-ups turned typical enterprise. It is an all-encompassing, extremely fine line.
Posted by: Brandon
i like this post and i appreciated this idea
Posted by: braindumps