Growth can be seductive and entrancing, says Steven A. Maxim, and sometimes the only way to continue to improve is to step back, let go of your successes and decide where the future really lies.
So to help him plan for future growth and surpass the $9.9 million the property preservation company posted in 2008 revenue, Maxim, president and CEO of Maxim Enterprises Inc., put a system in place to measure everything from accounts receivable to employee productivity.
Smart Business spoke with Maxim about how to monitor your growth to ensure future success.
Q. What are the keys to growing a company?
We’ve grown our company in a vertical manner, meaning that we’ve grown it very quickly. However, what we’ve seen is we haven’t really grown our company horizontally, and the approach that we’re taking now is growing horizontally, where we’re diversifying and going into some different areas.
We’ve taken a few steps backward to really build our infrastructure better.
This is a tough thing. When you’re growing so fast, you almost don’t realize where you’re at. Growth can be seductive, and it can be almost like a sleeping pill, but you get accustomed to all of this growth and everything is going well.
The important thing to remember is to be present, in the sense of seeing where you’re at and taking a few moments to step back from that growth and looking at, ‘All right, if I’m here and I want to keep that growth going forward, what do I have to do?’
Q. How do you make sure you stay present in the moment?
One way of doing that is looking at a continual monitoring of progress. Even though you have the growth, if you have really fast growth, you need to make sure you’re measuring everything.
In a fast-growing company, it’s not always possible, and that can actually hurt you in the long run. Measure almost everything; that way that growth is probably sustainable. And it will help the team achieve those longer goals and maintain that growth because then the team knows where they stand.
What we’ve seen in our growth business — and what was very difficult to try to measure at times — is how fast is our growth going and are we measuring the key indicators to maintain that growth?
