Cashflow Acceleration: Improving the Four Success Formulas

Improving Your Success
                    Formulas

Improving Your Success Formulas

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.

Best Practice Success Formulas for Tech Scaleups

  • 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.

Accelerating Success Formulas


Roland Siebelink talks all things tech startup and bring you interviews with tech cofounders across the world.