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.