You built a successful business. You are thinking about two pressing questions:
- How to grow your business beyond its current level, and
- How to make it less dependent on YOU.
In other words, how can your business grow and scale while giving you more work-life balance and freedom down the road? Curious? Read on!
In this article series, I have shared with you a toolbox designed for high-expertise businesses. High-expertise businesses are a special breed of business. They depend on high levels of expertise and talent in their field to provide their services, products or innovations. The toolbox’s purpose is to help you successfully plan and grow your business:
- Part 1: What Makes High-Expertise Companies So Special?
- Part 2: Brilliance Extraction™ for High-Expertise Businesses
- Part 3: Create Your Business Plan with Brilliance Extraction™ – A Powerful Tool For High-Expertise Companies To Grow And Scale Up
- Part 4: Examples of Business Plans from High-Expertise Companies
- Part 5: Business Planning with Fresh Eyes
- Part 6: Business Planning with Accountability
- Part 7: Success Behaviors That Skyrocket Your Results
- Part 8: How to Clone Yourself to Scale Your Business – The Growth Dilemma (this article)
Two Pressing Questions Remain
Now that your toolbox is just about complete let’s address two remaining pressing questions:
1. How can your business grow even faster?
2. How can you as the business owner create more freedom, work less or retire while your business flourishes?
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Luckily, both questions have the same answer. Let’s tackle one question at a time:
Pressing Question #1: How Can Your Business Grow Faster?
Does it sometimes seem like your business is stuck in an x dollar “rut”? By “rut” I mean that the company has grown pretty well to a particular revenue but now it is hard to grow beyond that level?
If that is you, you are far from alone. The reason that phenomenon is so common lies in the fact that a lot of knowledge is in your head – and only your head. The same often applies to a few key members of your team. Most high-expertise companies have a few key people. The business cannot function without them, or at the very least it cannot thrive and grow.
This is why Brilliance Extraction™ is such an important tool in your toolbox (see Part 2 and Part 3). You need to “extract” your expertise, ideas and transferable knowledge, and that of your key people out of your heads and document it. There is a straightforward way to accomplish this. Extracting, documenting and monetizing your key people’s brilliance is one of the most important steps a business needs to take to grow and scale up. Examples of the results of Brilliance Extraction necessary for scalable growth are:
- Critical content like whitepapers, blogs, articles, eBooks, web pages
- Training programs and manuals
- Processes and procedures
- Product and services descriptions
- Job descriptions
- Employee policies
Pressing Question #2: How Can You Create More Freedom, Work Less Or Retire While Your Business Flourishes?
After having extracted your brilliance, you are no longer at the risk that your business is dependent on a particular person, including yourself.
The implications are huge!
- Your business can now grow beyond its current revenue level (i.e., you can get out of the rut we were talking about.
- You have mitigated your risk to have your business go down when a key person leaves or is absent for any reason.
- You can work less or retire when you are ready.
How Can You Make Great Use of the Extracted Brilliance?
Brilliance Extraction™ produces documented processes, write-ups, videos, checklists, manuals and more.
- What is next? What do you do with all that now?
- How do you keep the information organized?
- How do you keep it safe and give only give access to authorized people?
- How do you use the materials and train others?
- Is there a SYSTEM that lets my staff access the information they need, track their progress and certify them?
Great questions.
The answer to the last question is “there is”. The system is an online Learning Management System (LMS). There are several well designed LMS’s available online. With such a system, you can build your own company’s training system or university. A significant amount of self-training and compliance related learning can streamline the time it takes to get staff fully up to speed.
How Can You Build Your Own Company’s Training System?
“That sounds great! How do I do build such a training system?“, you ask. Building such a system is best done step-by-step.
In brief. you write down your company’s expertise areas. From those, you pick the most important area as the first one to work on. Alternatively, you might select an area that strikes you as easy to do.
Ask yourself (or key people in your company): “Which course or courses do we need to achieve our objectives in that area?” Start with one course.
Outline it as brief modules. Structure each module so that it is easy for your trainees to absorb the information. include downloadable resources as needed.
You can round off each module with a brief quiz. Your trainees can get certifications which they can print out and hang on their wall. The system keeps track off who was trained on what.
To assist you with this process we made a brief guide for you, “10 Steps to Scaling Your Company’ With your Own Learning Management System.” You can get it here.
In Summary: You CAN Overcome the Owner’s Growth Dilemma
The Learning Management System we describe here is the path to growing and scaling your company. With it, you create the possibility for you to enjoy more freedom, work less and even retire when you are ready for it while your company continues to grow well into the future.
- With critical brilliance extracted, documented and converted into a protected training system, your company is worth more.
- Your risk to have invaluable knowledge suddenly lost is mitigated at last.
- With that, you have mastered the owner’s growth dilemma.
You might be intimated by the process I have outlined here. I invite you to believe that this is quite possibly for you to do. This article and our downloadable guide is here for you so you can see how to do it. It is also smart to get some help with bringing this concept to reality. Give us a call, and we will be happy to talk with you about it for free.
Have a top-notch day!
Dr. Stephie
Dr. Stephie Althouse is the founder of Top-Notch CEO and Top-Notch CEO Academy (TopNotchCEO.com). She has a Ph.D. in chemistry. She has worked with many high-expertise companies, first as an award-winning innovator herself and then as executive, turnaround authority, growth expert and executive coach. Her success in helping high-expertise companies get more from their expertise is based on her ability to bridge the languages of their crafts with that of leadership and business.
