Be Big

“Hope Is Not a Strategy”

I guarantee you right now this quote is being uttered in a conference room or a zoom call. Its probably being uttered by a frustrated CEO who isn’t seeing their team deliver growth at the same pace the CEO did when they started the company. There’s a good chance that the statement is accompanied by a hand slapping the desk or an emphatic “come on guys, we can do better!”

The question is can they do better? Certainly they have the enthusiasm, the commitment, and the understanding of the vision. But the harsh reality is that the early success of the company was probably driven by the CEO leveraging unique relationships, experience, and market understanding that the team itself does not possess. That’s fine, but the CEO see’s it as “just that easy”, and believes that the ealry success should be repeatable. The team is anxious to deliver, however they may not have the specific tools, skills, and capacity to independently drive new growth, and this is creating a sense of tension and frustration.

I believe that the quickest way for leaders to get frustrated is for them to expect results from their team that the team itself is fundamentally incapable of producing. I can tell my 3 year old grandson to lift 100 pounds, but he’ll never do it. Not unwilling - incapable. In that same way some people think growth and business development are inherently “soft skills”, that require only tenacity and commitment to achieve. The old “I could do it, why is it so hard for you?” mentality.

So what’s the fix? Going back to our CEO, my money says the next step is to hire a former general or admiral, or government senior executive, thinking that the relationships and mission knowledge they bring will be enough to create a path to growth. With all due respect I think we know that this isn’t the fix that most companies are looking for.

A growth mindset is great but without the training, experience, and tools required its just that - a state of mind. I like to think of “the art and science of business development”. Part art, part science. As a business development executive I’ve explained to people that my job isn’t to engineer a solution, my job is to engineer a relationship to enable us to have a meaningful discussion about our solution. This is what Thornbrook Partners focuses on - helping growth teams understand and implement the right approaches and processes to create relationships and capture strategies that ultimately close new business. We accelerate your teams’ development timeline and help emerging companies deliver on leadership vision. This “fractional BD” model can accelerate your teams’ growth timeline and help deliver growth that makes a different.

Bad Growth

Back in the day when I was a newly designated Business Development manager my team was given the task by an equally new Operations Director to grow our pipeline. The Director wasn’t happy with the overall topline pipeline values and had a sense that we needed more. But the direction was clear - more dollars were needed.

I think you know where this is going. The team delivered new, bigger pipeline numbers. At the same time, I pulled my new Operations Director aside and gave a clear warning - the numbers you are about to see will bear no resemblance to reality. You gave them a task to create a larger pipeine, and wanting to please you they did it.

Problem is it’s all fiction. The new opportunities are simply value-drivers and probably not aligned to vision or strategy. But they checked the box. They are distractors, not enablers. And they come with opportunity cost.

I always like to remind my teams that not every dollar is a good dollar, at least as far as sustainable growth is concerned. As our Operations Director discovered growth teams will deliver whatever pipeline value that’s desired if the only direction they get is “grow our pipeline”. Precious time is going to be spent trying to qualify opportunities that drive pipeline value but have no real value to the corporation. The Director needed to consider factored value, not topline value, as a key indicator. The focus should have been on increasing the potential of winning existing opportunities, not making the pipeline appear healthier than it really is.

Sustaining growth that’s aligned with strategy is hard. Thornbrook Partners understands the challenges you face, and is here to help companies navigate these important growth stages. We’d love to talk to your team about how Fractional Business Development could help you achieve the growth results you most desire.