Sustainable growth
Sometimes growth means growing up.
The symptoms
- You’ve grown from 20 to 200 people, fast.
- The business is feeling dynamic, but increasingly chaotic.
- You don’t know everyone by name anymore.
- You haven’t changed, but recently you notice people doing their own thing.
- People are complaining about a lack of direction.
- You have invested in superstar employees from bigger businesses, but they are struggling and telling you that they need more structure and clarity. Or that they don’t have what they need to move you forward.
- Maybe growth isn’t happening as expected, the market doesn’t seem quite as convinced as you are?
The problem
Growing pains happen when a business experiences fast growth but its processes and culture haven’t caught up. Because the new joiners don’t have the experience of the early days and therefore lack the innate understanding of your purpose and vision, they can only do what they think is best, but lack direction. The ones coming from larger organisations often fail because they can’t find their way around existing (non-)structures and unwritten rules.
As your business grows and you embrace new opportunities, your purpose and positioning often evolve. As a result, what used to be a powerful story may not reflect reality.
When you’re experiencing growth pains, you need a fresh look at where you come from, where you want to go – and how you express this to all stakeholders, so that both your people and your customers can come with you. Some of the answers may be operational, but they will most certainly also involve recalibrating how you bring new people on board, revisiting your purpose and vision, and creating new and sharper tools to tell your story.
How it worked for Hudsons
Hudsons is an independent Central London estate agent that faced new competition from large chains. We engaged their whole team to reconnect with their founding purpose: bringing back the golden age of service. The business grew 40% and 35% in the first two years we worked together.
