Developing a business growth mindset
- Author: Yiuwin -
My co-founder and I recently had a conversation about changing job titles - should we go for CEO or MD, or something totally different like um… Chief Disruptor (absolutely not that one).
Since starting our digital marketing and business development consultancy, Disruptive Thinking, I’ve admittedly judged startup founders who took CEO as a job title when they were a team of 1 or 2. Full disclosure - I took the CEO role with another company I co-founded at the same time, but that’s another story. Despite having ambitious business growth objectives, modesty meant it just didn’t sit quite right with me at the time.
Anyway, fast forward five years and what's more important now, as we move into the next phase of business growth, is to put modesty aside and think what’s actually best for the business. We’re not a startup any more, and need to think about being less modest and braver with our choices. This comes down to two things - where Disruptive Thinking is as a digital marketing consultancy and where we are as a growing team. Having a growth mindset and planning for this has been absolutely vital in our journey as a business.
Advancing through business growth phases
When we first set up shop as a fledgling startup, Amy and I did everything. As clichéd as it sounds, we split the tasks between us, from ordering the coffees and the biscuits for the office biscuit tin (dark chocolate hobnobs or GTFO), through to writing new business proposals and delivering the work. Everything from designing marketing strategy through to building campaigns, and working on RDF and ERDF funded programmes. As it was just the two of us, having job titles of ‘founder / director’ felt just fine. We didn't really care enough to agitate for anything else and so the titles stuck and stayed till now.
It’s been a fascinating journey on many levels, getting the business to grow from where we were to where we are now. . Looking back, there were distinct phases of growth that we went through - perhaps at times more through coincidence than design.
Implementing a growth mindset
The first of these phases was understanding, or appreciating, what our objectives and goals were. It sounds a bit silly to think how did you not do this, but what I mean is that it took time and space to really consider what we wanted from the business - and more generally from life itself. What we wanted to do with the business had to complement what we wanted out of life, otherwise what’s the point?
What we achieved in growing the business has ultimately contributed to what we achieved in life. For some it’s fancy cars, houses and shiny new things (don’t get me wrong, I love a new toy), but for us it was about creating an environment where we could do our best work, with the best people, while feeling a sense of wellbeing - and for us, looking after these things meant the commercials soon followed suit.
How we measured this was not particularly scientific, but it was an awareness firstly that became a requirement. One of the key things we make sure to cover when we look at working with a new client is that we can achieve service culture fit. Can what we do, in terms of the services we provide, augment and be amplified by the internal culture of the client? Can we make incredible things happen through natural collaboration, and can we harness the enthusiasm through shared values that push very good projects into being exceptional? Call it a growth mindset or what you will, but working with teams that benefit from both the support and challenge approach means the results of business improvement come faster and are manifestly bigger.
Emphasising value in business growth strategy
The second business growth phase was understanding with clarity what the value is of what we do. ‘Value’ is one of those marketing jargon words that is in reality ever so important, and not only defining value but having confidence behind it really is key.
We originally weren’t able to succinctly articulate what we did well, because we didn’t frame it in the context of our clients. We didn’t walk around in their shoes because we found it difficult taking off our own. Once we were able to understand the different contexts of value, and once we really understood how we created value for our clients, we were better able to create the indicators and processes we used intuitively into services we could deploy strategically. We went through a phase of ‘productising’ our services. This process mapped out the deliverables, the objectives, the costs and requirements for successful execution. Whilst we don’t refer to products internally, we understand them, we know when to use them and when not to when helping our clients with their marketing, sales and operational development - when we support them and challenge them in their business growth strategy.
Giving away your Legos: delegating tasks to team members
The third phase we moved through as we grew was a growth in self awareness. As we recruited more people to the team, there was a growing self awareness between Amy and myself that we couldn’t do everything, which is a really hard thing to wrap your head around when the very service you’re providing is based on your own skills and expertise. We needed people who supplemented our skillset and grew the capability of the consultancy work we took on. We also needed to consider people who might actually be better than we are (you are the average of your team, after all). This was perhaps the most challenging phase - it meant letting go of things. Or, as one of my favourite blogs coined it, Giving away your Legos. As founders of our own business where we’ve had total control, even letting go of a little is really hard to start with. But, when we realised that giving away our legos, allowing others to create, to build and be part of the story empowered them to make us even better, it became much easier. Going through this process made us look at our own structures, workflows, roles and responsibilities not only as we grew, but even before we recruited Jenny as our Project Manager.
Going through these phases was not as cut and dried as writing them out in an article. They blur and merge together, overlap and converge in some moments, separate and seem disparate and disconnected in others. Perhaps the most interesting part of this business growth journey has been the personal part of it. Going from founder to manager has been pretty straight forward, certainly helped by recruiting a team of strong personalities and incredibly skilled individuals. Alison, our most recent recruit, brings such broad experience, every day is a school day for me when I work with her, and David continuously impresses me with his capability and intelligence to pick up and run with pieces of client work. Jenny’s ability to organise a huge disparate pile of objectives and tasks into a cohesive project plan is without exaggeration, a game changer. Having this ability in the team means Amy and I have been able to reflect and consider what roles we have, moreover what responsibilities we have, not only to the business, but to ourselves and the rest of the team. It’s really fascinating how this journey develops as you look back as a startup founder but look forward as a business leader.
CEO or MD - What’s in a job title?
This brings us back to the question posed right up at the top of this post: do we have a C-suite or do we have Directors of, CEO or MD specifically? How do you start to evolve these job titles as you grow, and how much do they matter?
As things stand, we’ve now grown to a small but mighty team of five, each bringing a key set of skills, digital experience and know-how to the party. It’s no small relief that the company now has more people, better at more things than I am. What that has meant for our clients is that they are better served with more expertise, capability and capacity. What this means for us as a team is that effectiveness and efficiency in process, structure and workflows has become super important. With that comes more clarity and definition on what our roles are within the team - for all of us, not just Amy and I.
We needed job titles that, from an internal perspective, give direction on what we do for the team, especially as we look to grow and expand over the coming months and years, but also give clarity externally for clients, connections and prospects as to what our respective roles and responsibilities are within the company.
For Amy, the critical piece of the jigsaw she works into place so well, that little pocket of space between client and delivery, that tiny gap that can become a chasm if not bridged seamlessly, where taking the concept out of a proposal or pitch deck (or god save us all, my notes) and working it into a project and deliverables, becomes real. It’s strategy at the sharp end. So I’m delighted to announce Amy is taking up the position of Chief Strategy Officer for Disruptive - looking after the strategic approach for us as a business, as well as for our clients and projects.
For me, well, I’m still sticking my nose into more things than I should. I'm looking after the overall operation of the business as well as the commercial performance and profitability. I still get to work with existing clients, but I’m also finding and connecting with new ones and getting to meet new partners all the time. So, officially, that makes me Chief Executive Officer - in reality, I’m still the guy that dresses like a teenager and refuses to wear anything but shorts (on my legs) throughout the year.
We’ve also ensured that the team’s job roles reflect an accurate picture of their capabilities and expertise. With Alison as our Content & Search Specialist, and David as our Digital Communications Manager, we are in a much better place to easily showcase our breadth and depth of skills in the team.
Do the right thing
If I was to hop into a time travelling DeLoren and give my younger self a bit of advice there’s probably two things I’d tell myself; firstly, don’t sweat too much on what you think are the ‘big’ decisions at the beginning, because things change so quickly, the direction of travel shifts so fluidly. It might feel like the most important thing in the world to get the colour palette right on your website, but the reality is that you need to go on an adventure of discovery to really know who you are and what you do to create value.
The second thing is don’t underestimate how far doing the right thing will get you. Yeah there will be a chance to land the world changing big deal, to take a stack of revenue for little work, but don’t compromise on why you do it - to create a genuinely valuable relationship, and that needs reciprocation, collaboration and trust. That’s how to measure your business growth. Lead with that and the rest will follow.
Also, start growing a beard earlier.
And buy some Bitcoin.
