In this episode, we have invited Laurence Ainsworth. He spent his formative years in sales and marketing in the IT industry working in the UK subsidiaries of companies like General Electric, McDonnell Douglas, and prime computer.
During his last employment, he worked in a fast-growing IT services business growing between 25 and 40% per annum over a decade, which is phenomenal growth. During that time, he rose to regional director of what became a footsie 100 business. And from 2002, he has worked as an independent consultant working with small and medium businesses.
Since 2011, he specialized in supporting high-growth businesses and has written one of the few books on high growth as well. These clients come from all sectors of the economy and are unified by their owner’s ambition to maximize the growth opportunities for their business.
Biggest challenges for companies
[3:07]
Typically, the biggest challenge is actually getting the business to grow with sales. When you look at high growth and if you take the Coronavirus situation, in particular, its sales lead growth. People have gone from selling beer to making hand sanitizers, but the demand for hands has just absolutely exploded. So going from making a very small amount to a massive amount. The two issues are one, where do you get the money to fund all this investment? And secondly, how do you get good people to make sure that you can deliver what you sell at the right quality?
Tips and Ideas in embracing an increase in cost as you grow
[5:58]
The first thing to think about is that if things are looking that you're going to grow rapidly, then what you very quickly have to do is to understand some internal metrics in your business. As you grow, initially, your costs will go up, because you've got to invest in the business to give the business the capability to meet the growth when it gets there. As it gets there, then your business will be more efficient, and you'll be able to pull back some of that extra cost. But people typically do this all too late.
[9:02]
And often with growth, it's about keeping that momentum going. As soon as the momentum starts to go, it's very hard to get it back.
Advice about investing in the infrastructure
[11:38]
You have to have faith in your ability to sell. You need to have a good sales forecasting system, which gives you confidence. Once you've got that, that then enables you to feed that back into the rest of the business. And it will do two things; one, most sales will enable you to generate some of the cash flow, to be able to make that investment early. But secondly, if you've got those sales and confidence, if you go to lenders, you can say, these are my forecasts, this is what it looks like, this is why I need the investment.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Free LinkedIn Mini-Course Training: https://www.ImpactForLeads.com
Find out more:
- Jason’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonaosborn/
- Laurence’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenceainsworth/
- Laurence’s email: laurence@managinghighgrowth.com
- Laurence’s website: www.managinghighgrowth.com
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Thank you so much and until next time keep… appreciate your atomic moments of impact.
Cheers,
Jason
