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In the month of October we’ve been holding some very intensive CEO workshops. Before we address these audiences we look at their web sites. This post is about that review. It wasn’t pretty. Read More

There has never been this much advice available to grow and even scale businesses. We are inundated with checklists, better ways of doing stuff, and best tips. But here is the problem. As a leader, you are letting it come to you. You are allowing interruption to wash over you. Read More

I regularly meet senior financial executives to discuss their business. I’m often impressed by the quality of analysis that has been performed on the numbers. However as a leader of a company, what I really want are stories not numbers. Read More

All products and services need to perform. They need to do the job they claim they can do. These days the bar for “ease of use” has been raised by an increasingly sophisticated audience. This post examines the importance of understanding how your customer uses your product. Read More

This weekend there was a great piece in the WSJ by Alexandra Wolfe about Howard Schultz the founder of Starbucks. There were so many great inspirational points on scaling a business, I felt the need to trap them here. I’ve added my take in italics. Read More

Of course advice on scaling any business is dependent on the stage you have reached. So let’s frame this post in terms of size. I’m going to assume your software business is generating annual sales between $5m and $25m. And you want to scale to $100m. Read More

Hyper-growth can really stretch your cash resources. Investments are being made at a very fast pace and lead times open up fast between cash received and cash paid out. At a technical level the accountants call it overtrading. An entrepreneur calls it – when the s hits the fan. Read More

We all know that bringing rigor to your sales process makes sense. However the difficulty is trying to execute one. In this post I've articulated a simple four stage system that will transform your sales pipelines. Read More

If you are in a hyper-growth state, growing at 25% to 250% per annum, trying to add dozens of new employees, you are entering a battle for talent. The ability to bring stability to that growth will be largely dependent on the talent you bring in. Read More

I came to Boston in October 2001 from London to manage a software business called Teamstudio. In the summer of the following year it would be listed at #91 on the Inc. 500 list, with a 4 year growth of 1888%, that’s 111% per annum! But that was just the start of our problems. Read More