Innovative, entrepreneurial, creative. While those adjectives can certainly be applied to very many business leaders, without a solid foundation, turning those qualities into growth and development isn’t always easy to achieve.
Professor Stephanie Hussels is Director of the Business Growth Programme at Cranfield University, the longest established owner-manager programme in the UK, and she is passionate about what the programme can deliver to help thriving small and scale-up businesses achieve their longer-term goals.
Here, she explains the benefits of the programme in guiding business owners to find the structure and direction they need.
In brief, what does the Business Growth Programme offer new and smaller businesses?
One of my favourite analogies is that just because a child grows tall, doesn’t mean they’re mature. The same thinking can be applied to businesses that have grown to a certain size and where the structure becomes more complex, and so it’s time to put processes in place to help it continue to mature in terms of revenue and other social impacts.
The programme is most effective, I think, when a business has been established at least two or three years and has around five employees. Typically, turnover will be around half a million pounds, usually more like £1m. This is usually the point where complexity starts to kick in. Before that, with one or two staff, you’re more likely to have informal conversations and make decisions fairly easily.
And why is the programme so important to owner-managers?
In bigger companies you need to drive entrepreneurial mindset throughout the team. Products and services remain fairly constant, but you need to continually innovate to keep pushing the business forward.
People usually start a business in order to do what they are really good at. At that point, they are in control, there are few processes necessary, and maybe just one or two other people in the business. Organisational structures inevitably become more important as you grow and that’s the time to look at how the company operates.
It’s very hard, as an owner-manager, to let go, to build trust and put things in place so that someone else can take over some control. Business is very personal to a founder or entrepreneur and seeing processes being managed by other people can be hard. But if you can put a culture in place that recognises the values of the founders and the organisation, an owner-manager will feel comfortable choosing which elements of the business they want to be most involved in.
How is the programme structured?
Each Business Growth Programme runs for around seven months and it starts with four key weekends a Friday and Saturday when everyone gets together at Cranfield, stays overnight and begins to look at what they need from the programme.
The first two weekends are all about where the business is now, where it is in terms of its market and financial challenges, and gaining an understanding of how the organisational structure is working and where each individual is as a leader.
The third weekend is about where to they want to go the Me part. People may want to grow a business, some might want to find a better balance, they might want to end up only working three days a week, or take a step back. They all need to know how to make that happen.
The fourth weekend is about how to get there? What do you need to put in place to achieve your ambitions?
After the first four weekends, they go away and work on a plan, and come back two weeks later and present that plan to a panel of experts. It’s very collaborative and it’s not Dragons’ Den. People need to have confidence that their plan is going to work; presenting it and getting feedback helps them to see that they are on the right track.
We then ask them back 100 days later and look at that plan and the strategy and how to continue to improve it going forward.
It sounds like it’s very much about support rather than teaching?
I describe it as holding a mirror up to the business. Those on the programme provide all the details so that we can work together on a solution. Th ere are business counsellors to support them through the process, and they also have the others on the programme to bounce ideas off and discuss issues within a safe environment.
When you’re leading a business there will be things you don’t want to discuss with someone who works for you, or someone you’re married to so you put it all on yourself. In this environment, they find a community where they can have informal conversations that help them work out solutions for themselves.
And everything they do on the programme is driven by them and their business, so they can go back to work after their weekends at Cranfield and discuss what they’ve learned with their colleagues and apply it directly to their own business from the start.
What we do, however, is provide a structure, because when you’re building new processes, there are a number of pieces that all fit together to make the business stronger, and there needs to be some strategy for how you approach it.
How successful is the programme at bringing about change?
Almost everyone who comes on the programme finds that it works, simply because what they are doing is working on their own real issues and future strategy for their business. We’re not telling them what to do, we’re helping them to see what needs to happen, and what they can do to put the right structure in place to allow it to happen.
The first two weekends are the most crucial because that is when they come to understand that a business has to be built on stone, not sand. If what you’re doing is not built on firm foundations, as soon as it reaches a certain size, it will start to crumble.
Stephanie Hussels – Director of Business Growth Programme (Cranfield University)
To find out more about the Business Growth Programme at Cranfield University visit the Cranfield website
