Consistently finding sufficient top talent can be a struggle for growing midsize businesses. As a result, companies can settle for merely good people. That’s not good enough for strong, predictable growth.

Great people – the most talented people – drive growth faster, creating midsized companies that are stronger than their competition.

Midsized companies that commit to a systematic recruiting process make talent a competitive advantage.

Our research shows that concentrating professional development initiatives on your highest-potential employees has the biggest impact on your growth.

Midsized companies have a strategic advantage: they can make more meaningful investments in professional development than small businesses, and they can make it more personal – and thus more effective – than big business.

You can create customized professional development programs for high-potential employees and reward them with one-on-one coaching and challenging work assignments. Providing high-potentials with more accelerated career paths can be highly motivating, as they can see that the distance to important, coveted roles is relatively short.

Developing even four or five of your best people to become company rock stars, significantly increases the chances that your company’s growth will rocket up the charts.

Growing midsized companies can’t scale on the backs of a few heroes. The real heroes are strong teams.

Leaders at all levels of the strongest midsized companies must make the journey from being an individual hero to working collaboratively to lead teams. The work in midsized companies is too complex and too interdependent to rely on a single leader.

The strongest midsized companies intentionally strengthen their teams’ ability to perform to consistently drive growth.

A strong plan and implementing that plan are equally important for sustainable, predictable growth.

The most successful midsized businesses create higher-level strategic plans that look forward 3-5 years, and separate shorter-term operational plans that clarify activities in the year ahead.

Midsized firms can’t just react. They must have clarity about goals on precise time horizons, identify the exact steps they will take to get there and assign accountability for who is leading and supporting these efforts within the company. Work ranges from ongoing validation of the business model all the way down to planning day-to-day operations. It is important to choose the right amount of planning and governance at the right levels.

Implementing a planning method such as The One Page Business Plan is a piece of this driver.

Midsized companies are way too complex to make decisions without data. To grow and scale your business, you need systems. Strong systems require collecting accurate data, analyzing it and using it to make decisions.

With the right data, you know when and how to take the appropriate risks and actions that will drive your company to successful growth.
Midsized companies must excel at collecting and leveraging data not just on financials, but on production, sales, employees, vendors and the customer experience. To create predictable growth, it’s essential to build systems that create and scale data collection and usage. Knowing how to analyze it and benchmark it are necessary in making the decisions that drive growth.

Building a data driven organization is a big undertaking, but absolutely essential for systematic growth.

Hitting ambitious goals requires availability of resources – especially financial resources.

Successful midsized businesses rely on leaders who clearly understand their financial wherewithal, who can accurately forecast what resources will be required to drive growth. It’s essential to making appropriate investments – but not getting over-extended.
As businesses mature, accounting and finance functions must not only record history with accuracy but anticipate the informational and financial needs for the future. Midsized firms go beyond “the accounting department” to have clearly defined functions for finance and treasury as well as accounting. Finance and budgeting play a pivotal role in decision making across the organization.

Attracting and retaining customers, winning against competition, attracting top talent and building relationships with the best vendors all require deep understanding.

Small businesses can sometimes “feel” what’s going on in the market. But at midsized, with dozens or hundreds of people on the front lines — and throughout the organization – understanding needs to be systematized.

The top midsized companies track and analyze shifting marketplace conditions, and use that intelligence as a competitive advantage to stay ahead of the competition, anticipate market trends and attract the best talent and partners.

Significant sustained growth requires strategic growth initiatives.

Companies need to look for opportunities to enter new markets, launch new products and attract new customers.

Midsized companies need a pipeline of innovative ideas that lead to new revenue streams. Sometimes these ideas can be implemented successfully with existing resources. Often, firms can accelerate growth in bigger leaps by buying companies or creating strategic partnerships with other businesses.

We show you how to systematically look for and execute opportunities to ensure that your company takes a big leap forward, not a leap into the abyss.

Achieving sustainable growth requires a selling system with the right people and tools, supported by marketing that puts leads into your pipeline and nurtures them until they are ready to buy.

Sales superstars can be useful, but they are not scalable. You can’t recruit enough of them to drive your company from, say, $50 to $100 million. If you want predictable growth, it’s important to clearly define roles and responsibilities such as effective sales managers, territories and expertise on specific products and services.

Sales must understand how to pursue the highest potential targets and opportunities, and how to connect with customers. Marketing needs to support sales with the right messages and materials that address what customers really want and need.

Lead generation and lead nurturing also needs to be systematic, leveraging technology, such as CRM and marketing automation platforms.