Does your company seem to get less efficient as it grows? Are you constantly
playing arbiter between the heads of your different functions? Then it may be
time to identify key cross-functional processes and improve your four success
formulas. Our free “Cashflow Acceleration” worksheet will enable you to reap the
cash hidden in inefficiencies, while avoiding big-bureaucracy process redesign.
From Filling Functional Gaps
As an entrepreneur in the middle of scaling up your business, it is sometimes
difficult to see the forest for the trees. In most cases, businesses are started
by people who have a particular expertise or knowledge base that opens a market
for their business idea. It is also true that these entrepreneurs have gaps in
their knowledge of starting and running a business. These gaps may pertain to
administering the business, finance, human resources, engineering, or any number
of areas that require particular expertise.
…to Establish Cross-Functional Flow
It is natural to seek to fill these gaps by hiring experts to fill roles in the
company and manage various aspects of the business. Over time and as the company
grows, organizations will develop functional silos under these subject matter
experts. As you scale up, you must be aware of these silos and be ready to
consider how these individual functions in your company must come together to
serve your customer. Otherwise, you may lose sight of the holistic, end-to-end
process in your company and unintentionally complicate your customers’
interaction with your company.
Determining Your Key Success Processes
If this silo effect is affecting your operations, you will need to improve your
day-to-day operations in terms of cost, quality, and flow by integrating
functional areas to work smoothly together. The key to reorienting toward this
more holistic approach is to introduce more process-based thinking. One way to
do this is to have an executing brainstorming session to delineate and agree on
key success processes for your business. This will help you to generate a common
understanding of these key processes and assign accountability for
implementation and improvement.
- Product Development Cycle: Innovation Machine
- Marketing and Sales Cycle: Customer Attraction Machine
- Customer Success Cycle: Value Delivery Machine
- Billing and Optimization Cycle: Profit Protection Machine
How to Get Started
To start improving your success formulas, in your next executive offsite, first
determine which 3-5 cross-functional processes are absolutely key for long-term
competitiveness (or take the four we propose if they seem to reflect your
business model. Then agree on what to define as the input and the output of each
process. Finally, assign one executive each as a cross-functional owner of each
of the success formulas, accountable for ever decreasing cycle time, cost and
error rates.
How to Ensure Continuous Improvement?
In the next quarterly offsite, dig deeper to quantify the success formulas with
tools such as our
Cash
Acceleration/ Improving Your Success Formulas worksheet. These tools provide a
scorecard to benchmark your current status and measure improvements on a
quarterly basis as you continue to scale up. All with the goal of integrating
your operations to enhance your customer’s experience with your company.
You may download the worksheet “Cash Acceleration Success Formula” below.
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