Exceptional Enterprise Program
The Exceptional Enterprise Program
Overcome business challenges and prepare your organization for sustainable growth.
Exceptional Enterprise Program
Overcoming the hurdles to growth at any stage of your business trajectory.
Program Details and Syllabus
Start Leading the Pack
If you’re putting out fires, solving one problem at a time just to keep moving forward, you are not alone. You’re in the “pack” along with about 95% of other businesses in your vertical… in all verticals. So who’s leading the pact? They are the few “exceptional” businesses who learned that the outdated approach of “patching” the problem-of-the-day doesn’t address underlying issues that limit real, competitive growth. Instead, exceptional companies learn to diagnose the root causes of challenges and implement practical solutions. With a management team focus on the real obstacles, they can create sustainable growth and became an Exceptional Enterprise. They now lead the pact!
Where to Begin
The classic Seven Stages of Growth methodology is a starting point for becoming an Exceptional Enterprise. This method provides a basis for understanding that while sustainable growth requires problem-solving, the nature of the challenges to be solved at any one time in a business’s trajectory is unique to that business’s particular stage of growth – with each stage defined by the number of people in the organization. In essence, as you add people, you add complexity. Taking action on symptoms may work for a while; however, the challenge can reappear later. Adding more people translates to distinct, identifiable, and predictable challenges that directly impacted a company’s ability to sustain growth. The Stages of Growth approach helps organizations focus attention and effort on the specific underlying challenges that crate roadblocks in their journey to get to the next level of competitive performance.
“… one of the most unique and dynamic business growth models I’ve ever encountered. Their proprietary Stages of Growth Matrix encapsulates a company’s life cycle, not by revenue but by employee size.”
B. Gravely, Growth10
How Many Classic Challenges is Your Company Facing Right Now?
- Core Values Unclear
- Cost of Lost Expertise
- Culture Resistant to Change
- Destabilized by Chaos
- Difficulty Diagnosing Problems
- Difficulty Forecasting Problems
- Employee Turnover
- Hiring Quality People
- Inadequate Sales Revenue
- Inadequate Profits
- Lack of Staff Buy-In
- Leadership-Staff Gap
- Limited Capital to Grow
- Marketplace Rapidly Changing
- Not Getting Systems into Place
- Organization Uninformed about Growth
- Poor Staff Training
- Products Not Differentiated
- Slow Getting Offerings to Market
- Staff Satisfaction Not Linked to Company Success
- Weak Business Model
- Weak Cash Flow Bills
How Many Classic Challenges is Your Company Facing Right Now?
The Missing Elements
The Stages of Growth methodology effectively compartmentalizes and understands underlying challenges tied to the business life cycle. A refinement of the method – called ReWilding® – provides a more comprehensive framework for performance improvement by integrating techniques to diagnose, prescribe, and predict the key elements missing in a business’s ecosystem that are the “missing elements” to providing tangible, lasting solutions to the issues identified.
ReWilding®
This approach takes its cue from nature. In the mid-1990s, Yellowstone National Park’s ecosystem was failing. Park Rangers and Scientists decided on a scientific method called rewilding, which restores an ecosystem’s natural balance and wildness by introducing a missing element. They took straightforward action: they introduced packs of grey wolves, a species absent from the park for over 70 years. This one change set off a “trophic cascade” that reverberated throughout the animal species and plant life. Remarkably, the introduction of the wolves even changed the park’s physical geography by impacting how the streams and rivers flowed.
“… one of the most unique and dynamic business growth models I’ve ever encountered. Their proprietary Stages of Growth Matrix encapsulates a company’s life cycle, not by revenue but by employee size.”
B. Gravely, Growth10
Why This Matters
At any growth stage, owners and leaders should ask: What are the vital systemic elements missing in our current business that disrupts our ability to implement lasting solutions to underlying roadblocks to sustainable growth? The ability to re-introduce (or reinforce) the missing (or weak) elements that are critical to the “underlying problem-sustainable solution” process at each stage of growth is the ability to become an Exceptional Enterprise.
“Growth is a focus of my overall business philosophy, and that is why I have appreciated the Stages of Growth methodology for several years. Rather than just solving the immediate issues a business owner faces, it focuses on the root causes of barriers to growth.”
R. Laurie, Integ Solutions
On Becoming Exceptional
Moving from struggling, to ordinary, to competitive, to Exceptional is a process that involves identifying the three to six key elements that are missing at any one stage of business and then working to “re-introduce” those elements back into the business. This process continues at each growth stage because the challenges evolve as additional people add to management complexity. In essence, becoming Exceptional is an ongoing process embodied in an organization.
“What surprised me the most is how much deeper we dive into the actual business and improving my business. It’s not just theories.”
CEO
The Journey to Leading
This ReWilding® process begins with Discovery, an understanding of organizational goals, and the barriers to reaching them. Next is an Assessment process, evaluating an organization’s current “functioning” compared to the eleven elements of Exceptional Enterprises. Assessment findings lead to a road map for infusing the needed elements over a nine to twenty-four-month period. This Implementation stage builds on incremental successes and prepares the entire organization for the next stage of growth.
As a business leader, when you understand The Stages of Growth, you will be better able to:
- Communicate clearly with your team about the rules of your organization’s current stage
- Diagnose and identify solutions to the issues your organization faces
- Enable your organization to become “unstuck” or to handle rapid growth successfully
- Understand your impact as a leader on your company’s performance
- Direct the forces that drive your company’s profitability
“The benefits greatly outweigh the cost. So far, the investment I’ve made has paid itself back in two months, and we haven’t even scratched the surface yet.
Peter DeFinis, CEO/Owner, TechForward IT