Get outside help. Bring in some business consultants. Any small business trying to grow, it’s nice to have an outside perspective on where you are and where you should be. In that, you can often identify gaps or holes that need to be filled, and some of those will be in terms of leadership and experience that the company would benefit from bringing in from the outside.
It depends on where you start from, of course. We started as a family-based business. One of the first things we did was bring in a family business consultant. For us, it was knowing that we had family business issues, and how can we identify and really address those correctly, and that was bringing in a family business expert.
Beyond the family business expert, there’s a multitude of experts. There’s a whole industry that’s grown up around providing advice and consulting now. Anyone can benefit from some form of a business coach to just provide a fresh perspective. You get stuck in your day-to-day routines of doing what you do, in the way that you do it, and that leads to stagnation and failure to recognize new opportunities, … so anybody from a third-party perspective sheds a whole new light on where new opportunities exist.
Hire consultants like you would employees. Ideally you want someone who has worked in a similar or related business or industry. … Then you want to look for some success — how have the businesses that this consultant has coached fared after the work was done? Did they go on and were they able to implement the strategies and ideas given?
Oftentimes, we would work through referrals — through networking contacts, both within and (outside of) the industry. We would look for folks, ‘Have you worked with this company or individual before?’
There’s no replacing good old face time — interviewing. Sit down with this person prior to engaging them and find out what their philosophies are and what their experience is. Does that fit with your philosophies and objectives? You don’t want to bring in a yes-man to further the ways you’ve been working. But definitely somebody who has a similar philosophy of growth and they understand the growth cycle that your company is in and hopefully has been there before to help guide others through the same waters.
We’re more interested in quality over quantity. If I had brought in a franchise expert who was purely growth, purely show me the numbers, that would not be a good fit with our company. That’s part of the process of weeding through the available candidates to find the right match for us.
How to reach: Sunbrook Franchising Inc., (770) 426-0619, www.sunbrookacademy.com or www.sunbrookfranchise.com