The difference between watching 5 year olds and professionals play soccer is a powerful illustration of what organizations feel like as they mature — early startups tend to have people swarm every issue, like little kids playing “magnet ball”, while mature organizations has clear responsibilities and expectations.
I recently presented at a Veteran Institute for Procurement (VIP) event, as part of their VIP ADVANCE program. VIP is an amazing organization, based in Montgomery County, Maryland, focused on helping Veterans start and grow great businesses. I attended one of the sessions, as an executive in a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business back in 2010, and it was an incredible learning and mentorship experience. Successful business leaders from other SDVOSBs and VOSBs were very generous with their time to come and teach sessions on a wide variety of topics, and they’ve since added several levels to the program. VIP ADVANCE, which I presented at earlier this week, is for CEOs of Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned and Veteran-Owned Small businesses that are doing $10 million or more in annual revenue.
VIP is great, and I’d recommend it to Veteran entrepreneurs as a great source of knowledge and a powerful network, and to successful business leaders as a noble organization to share your time and expertise with!
Regarding growth, I talked about a focus on identifying the levers that will move your organization’s value up (see slide 9), to identify what key metrics to focus on, to really move your organization’s valuation needle:
Regarding scalability and resilience (the importance of not letting a fast-growing company turn into a house of cards that will collapse under it’s growth), I talked several things include culture, strategic planning, establishing a strong operating cadence, policies, processes, applications, knowledge management, and org design.
Here’s the presentation:
mikehking 