Get buy-in on your vision. You’ve got to set a vision in the minds of all employees of who we are and where we’re going. About four years ago, we set a vision in front of everybody at our strategic planning conference.
I said where we should be in 10 years, and I walked out and let an outside facilitator take it from there and talk to senior management. When he was done talking with them, there was buy-in. We get buy-in from everybody on plans. Those plans are the road maps that show where we want to go.
We continually fine-tune our internal process. As you grow, you have to make sure the processes you set up will grow with you. A process set up for a $2 million company will not work for a $10 million company. One set up for a $10 million company will not work for a $50 million company.
You’ve got to continually fine-tune and stay on top of your forecasting and cash flow. Cash flow is what strangles a lot of companies. They grew too fast and ran out of cash. That’s one of your top priorities to make sure that never happens.
Manage growth by preparing new leaders. With growth, it means people have to grow, too. We need new leaders and new managers, so we offer continuing education to all employees.
We bolster our hiring and recruitment process. We have a strong commitment to leadership development. The courses we send these individuals through, they do not teach them how to be a leader. It makes them aware of what a leader really is, and if they don’t get it, they don’t get it.
This year we had 20 people that have gone through this course, and one of them came back and didn’t get anything out of it. If you go in with a closed mind, you come out with nothing. I think everybody else has learned something from this course.
There have been a few years where we grew faster than we should have, but that’s hard to control. We’re at a point in our growth cycle where we’ve got to pause a bit. We’re going to achieve $65 to $70 million in revenue in 2007. We’ve got to pause to regroup and get our processes in place to take us to the next level. If you can’t manage that, it’ll spiral out of control.
Keep growing and your employees will grow with you. Our commitment to growth allows employees a vehicle to grow. If you remained a $10 million company for 40 years — unless somebody left, died or got terminated — you wouldn’t get promoted.
We try to provide that opportunity for people and the only way to provide that opportunity is to grow. We’ve had many people come here who have left smaller companies because they didn’t have the opportunity to grow. People want that opportunity to grow.
HOW TO REACH: The Tri-M Group, LLC, (610) 444-1000 or www.tri-mgroup.com
