Is the Growth programme for you?
By this stage, you’ve quite a bit of experience running your company. You’ve broken through those first barriers to build a business that employs quite a few people, with a good number of clients, and some processes to keep things moving.
Of course that just presents a new set of challenges!
The Growth programme will help you take control of them. There are no hard and fast rules, but participants typically employ 6-25 people and turnover between £0.5 - £2.5M. It’s for leaders who want to scale beyond this level but are still grappling with issues around teams, structure, vision, process and sales.
We explore how you should address these across the three core elements of your business
Running the business
- Setting clear growth targets
- Robust processes to guarantee progress
- Sticking to the vision- Leader accountability
- Using finance for planning
- Reduce monthly wages stress
Making Operations fizz
- Building effective teams
- Making staff accountable
- Cutting out wasteful repetition
- Real cultural values to improve loyalty
- Improving product and service value
Improving sales and marketing
- Perfect your sales playbook
- Fine-tune and exploit your funnels
- Focused and magnetic marketing
- Retainers and repeatable revenue
- Maximising profits
Welcome to the Academy for Creative CEOs
A business can’t afford to stand still. Stagnation sets in surprisingly quickly. That doesn’t mean every business has to be the next unicorn, but it’s vital to have a clear idea of the type and scale of business you’re building – along with the most efficient and effective ways to build it.
The trouble is, there’s just so much advice and ideas out there – you’ve probably consumed a bunch of books and a playlist of podcasts already. The Growth programme picks out the most relevant insights for a digital, creative or tech business in your position.
Using workshops, peer groups, instructions and homework you’ll build detailed insights into the right direction to take across all these topics. This is not just theoretical. You’ll get clear instructions and be expected to apply the lessons to your business straightaway.
We know you’ll have tried some of this already, but we're assuming quite a bit won’t have stuck. That’s natural. You’re busy. So we add one extra element - a healthy dose of accountability. Every month you’ll be expected to feedback on your progress with your peer group. The peer groups are an essential element. You’ll tease out each other’s ideas, and share your experiences and expertise with like-minded individuals, facing simmilar issues.
After 12 months you’ll be able to see strong improvements to your growth plans, backed up by robust processes and motivated staff. And, as all the groups are 100% non-competing, there’s an undeniable chance you’ll have built close relationships leading to great opportunities for partnerships or recommending each other to clients.
You'll be completely set to achieve your target - whatever it is...
The Foundations For Growth
12 months of business focus
The goal of this programme is growth. You’ve already done a lot of the hard work just to reach this position. Now it’s time to capitalise on it. Over 12 months you'll strengthen the foundations you have already, then build on them with more clarity, better productivity and improved profitability.
First you’ll stress test resilience. There’s no point growing customer revenues just for the business and staff to creak - and possibly collapse - under the pressure. You’ll review:
- Your personal growth targets and goals
- Your business targets and goals – and strategies to achieve them
- Your business purpose and value for customers
- Transmitting an inspiring vision
- Existing pain points and barriers to progress
- The processes to manage yourself, senior staff and outcomes
- Staff and team strengths & weaknesses
- If staff truly buy into your culture
Once that’s all clear, you’ll develop the tools, techniques and processes needed to improve them. With a rock solid team in place and rigorous processes in place you’ll focus on building profitability:
- Pricing and product value
- Pushing the sales funnel
- Maximising repeat custom and retainers
- Building customer relationships
- Exploiting new market opportunity
- Speeding it up through investment or finance
By the end, you’ll have complete faith that the processes in your business are fit for growth. You’ll be confident that staff are motivated by your goals and culture - not just their salary. You’ll know exactly where you’re heading - and how to measure progress week-in/week-out.
On top of that you will connect with customers much better. You’ll truely understand value, have better pricing, build stronger relationships, generate new revenues and deliver what customers really need. Meanwhile, your business becomes increasingly attractive for investment. So, if you want to short-cut the growth trajectory, you’ll be able to attract the money you need to do it.