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While no two businesses are exactly alike, they tend to face common challenges. Our extensive research has shown that, regardless of industry or revenue, small and mid-size business owners often encounter similar obstacles based on the number of employees in the company.
These are some of the common challenges that can hinder their growth or lead to stagnation:
The ReWild Group offers a comprehensive framework known as Organizational ReWilding to assist business owners in effectively working on their businesses. This methodology is grounded in decades of research involving over 1,500 small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) and provides a structured approach to business growth and development.
At The ReWild Group, we believe in the importance of working on your business. Spending time working on the business, rather than solely in the business, is crucial for long-term success. Here are eight reasons why.
Discover how Mike Walraven transformed Syncroness through The Exceptional Manager Program (EMP), a comprehensive leadership development initiative. By identifying key pain points and fostering an ownership mindset, Walraven aligned his team for unprecedented growth and success. Learn more about how the EMP can elevate your leadership team.
Many business owners are familiar with the concept of peer groups—regularly scheduled meetings with other CEOs or business leaders to share perspectives, get new insights, and learn tips and strategies that will help their business thrive.
While there are a lot of positives to this type of experience, we’ve also found there to be some negatives.
The Stage 7 leader is tasked with reigniting the entrepreneurial spirit that characterized the organization in earlier Stages. They achieve this through creating a compelling vision, one that is shared amongst the Leadership Team and clearly communicated to the entire organization. In contrast to the previous Stage, where the leader guided the Leadership Team in creating the vision for the future, the leader is now collaborating with the Leadership Team to create that vision.
Whether you are a first-time project manager or a veteran, the Project Management Triangle is a critical concept in successfully managing a project.
The Project Management Triangle is made up of the three basic dimensions of a project—Time, Scope, and Resources (which can also be thought of as the Cost of the project).
The common misalignment in this Stage comes from a leader who wants to maintain a higher allocation to the Manager or Specialist Faces, not wanting to give up operational oversight, which can result in a frustrated Leadership Team that wants to take on more responsibility.
We recently posted about a manager’s role as both Coach and Supervisor. Today, we’re going to delve into the topic of problem solving, a task consistently required of every manager.
Regardless of the industry or area of focus, managers are responsible for the output of their team and serve as a resource when obstacles arise. Although not every manager is naturally a good problem solver, there are techniques that can be learned to improve anyone’s problem-solving skills.
Stage 5 is characterized by a strong management team that is the organization’s driving force. It also marks the return of a significant focus on the Visionary Face. With a strong management team in place, the leader is now tasked with presenting a clear, compelling vision that engages these managers, so they can in turn guide the staff with a clear vision and common language. In Stage 5, the leader is responsible for painting the picture of the future but should be empowering the management team to get the organization to that destination.
In our last post, we looked at the role Managers play as Supervisors. In addition to supervision, excellent Managers also provide coaching to their direct reports. This article looks more closely at what it means to be a Coach.
Managers have a role to both supervise and coach those they manage. In this post we will look more closely at the role of Supervision, and the next post will focus on the role of Coach.
Supervision is the act of overseeing others doing the work. It’s not supervision when you roll up your sleeves to help your staff do the work. Supervision is limited to the time you spend providing oversight to your staff getting the work done.
In a previous post we highlighted a company that participated in the Exceptional Manager Program. Today, we’re going to shine the spotlight on a welding company that worked with a Certified Adviser to incorporate several Elements over a period of 18 months.
The story of Commercial Welding is truly astonishing. Despite not knowing anything about the welding industry, the person who bought the company managed to increase its annual revenue 4X — from $900K to $3.8 Million with a 30% Net Income.
Organizational ReWilding is based on the concept of rewilding in nature, a process that occurs when a missing element is reintroduced into an ecosystem. While there are many useful parallels between the two systems, there is a fundamental difference between them: biological ecosystems come about naturally without human intervention, whereas businesses are consciously created.
The process of starting a business requires someone with vision, imagination, and a high level of risk tolerance; businesses do not spontaneously appear. The owner is concerned about all aspects of the business, including profit, cash flow, competition, employees, and cost control (among others).
In Stage 4, the leader ideally spends 10 percent of their time and energy wearing the Visionary Face, 70 percent wearing the Manager Face, and 20 percent wearing the Specialist Face. Stage 4 is characterized by a leader who is actively developing a management team that leads strong departments.
We talk a lot on our blog about the different ways that Organizational ReWilding can impact a business. Most of the time, our focus is on the methodology itself – looking in-depth at different dimensions of a business or taking a deep dive into one of the 11 Elements.
The Stages of Growth clarifies the optimal number of managers and leaders for a business. This blog post shows what that ideal number looks like across the seven Stages of Growth. This framework serves as the ideal for businesses to follow, with the management and leadership teams growing in proportion to the needs of the organization. In reality, however, many leaders miss these transitions.
In Stage 3, the leader ideally spends 10 percent of their time and energy wearing the Visionary Face, 60 percent wearing the Manager Face, and 30 percent wearing the Specialist Face. Stage 3 is dominated by managing work and people. Since the number of people in the organization has tripled from just two Stages ago, the Manager Face consumes the majority of the leader’s energy. For the first time in the Stages of Growth, the number of people in the organization exceeds the leader’s span of control. This new dynamic drives the need for the leader to delegate work they used to perform themselves.
Stage 7’s Gates of Focus are People, Process, then Profit. The number of employees in a Stage 7 company is double or triple what the company had in the previous stage, an increase that demands for People to be the top priority. The primary way a leader can successfully show a focus on People is by investing in the growth of the Leadership Team. The company is too large for the CEO to have regular, personal interactions with all employees. He or she must rely on the Leadership Team (who in turn invests in the Management Team), as the primary driver of successful employee engagement.
In Stage 2, the leader is ideally spending 40 percent of their time and energy wearing the Visionary Face, 20 percent wearing the Manager Face, and 40 percent wearing the Specialist Face.
As an organization grows in complexity, so too does its need for structure to keep the complexity from turning into chaos. One important way organizations add structure is through Meeting Models. In general, smaller organizations are less complex than larger organizations, and necessitate fewer Meeting Models. As an organization grows, it should steadily add structure to more of its meetings.
Stage 6’s gates of focus are People, Profit, and Process. Maintaining a healthy company culture is important with the number of people between 96 to 160, making People the top priority. A big part of an organization’s success of this size is the ability to successfully assimilate new people so they are engaged and effective at their assigned roles. By this stage, the company must be growing a Leadership Team that can take over responsibility of the day-to-day activities of the business from the CEO. The gap between the CEO and incoming employees has never been wider, which is why it’s so important for the layers of leadership to be acting together as a cohesive unit.
In Stage 1, leaders are ideally spending 40 percent of their time and energy wearing the Visionary Face, 10 percent wearing the Manager Face, and 50 percent wearing the Specialist Face. Stage 1 is almost equal parts providing the vision for the company and executing on that vision.
Every organization holds different types of meetings. Generally, some of those meetings would benefit from a greater level of structure. Good candidates include those that occur often, involve a significant amount of time, or have a high degree of impact. In cases where structure is desired, Meeting Models are a useful tool. Meeting Models are organization-specific templates that define a meeting’s purpose, outcomes, protocol, and positions/roles involved.
Stage 5’s Gates of Focus are Profit, People, and Process. In Stage 5, the attention must now return to Profit to ensure that enough capital is generated to sustain a larger organization. A leader can successfully focus on Profit in two key ways: 1) ensuring business development has a synergistic strategy across marketing, sales, and customer service to generate consistent and growing revenue; and 2) tasking departments to lower costs.
In Stage 7, the ideal Builder-Protector Ratio is 2:1, which means there is twice the level of confidence as caution in the organization. The 2:1 ratio reflects a relationship between Builders and Protectors that advances the company at a sustainable pace. The company will need to double its number of employees to grow completely through Stage 7, a process that can take a long time.
While an organization can have many types of meetings, not every type of meeting needs to have the same level of structure. Meetings improve when they adopt a suitable level of structure. While there’s no magic formula that reveals which meetings require more structure and which require less, we have identified three characteristics that can help determine the appropriate level of structure.
Stage 4’s Gates of Focus are Process, Profit, and People.
In Stage 4, getting scalable processes and systems in place is critical to facilitate future growth. Businesses that progress past Stage 4 without adequate attention to processes and systems will pay the price in later Stages. One of the most significant ways that a leader can focus on Process is by putting in place well-trained, professional managers who are capable of building strong departments. These managers should have the experience and skills to implement the building blocks necessary for their department to deliver high levels of quality in the functional area the department serves. These building blocks include scalable, trainable, and repeatable processes and systems.
In Stage 6, the ideal Builder-Protector Ratio is 3:1, which means there is three times the level of confidence as caution in the organization.
Organizations of every size have meetings. Meetings are necessary to bring people together and create a shared perspective. Without meetings, people are left to make decisions in isolation, lacking input from other areas of the company. Since an individual rarely has a comprehensive view of a situation, it’s not typically optimal for just one person to run the show.