Recently, Reb Risty, head of REBL Marketing, sat down with Dale Robinette, a business growth strategist and a specialist in scaling up businesses. Risty and Robinette have worked together for several months, and their conversation focused on the topic of helping businesses scale. Here, Robinette offers his insights into what business growth looks like and how it can be achieved.
Dale Robinette, a veteran of corporate America, has worked with big companies for most of his career. Throughout his career, he has focused on the idea of growth, particularly exponential growth, and he spent many months researching its attainability. Out of tens of millions of companies, Robinette says that just 0.4% ever make it beyond $10 million. What are companies struggling with as it relates to growth? Why can’t they get bigger?
While everyone is looking for one answer, the magic key to achieving growth, in reality, it’s not that easy, Robinette cautions. But there are a handful of areas that can really change a business and improve growth potential as outlined below
Setting Your Business up for Success
- People first: Companies are ultimately made up of people, and getting the right people is always the first place to look. Do you have the right people in the right roles?
- The right offering in the right markets: Too many times, Robinette says, he runs into companies that want to achieve exponential growth, but with what they’re offering or where they’re offering it, there’s no room for growth. Even if that room exists, however, you need cash in order to fuel growth.
- Having the right tools to support a healthy company. It’s one thing to have all of these components going for you, but ultimately, you really need to have the right tools to achieve exponential growth.
- Strong desire to actually achieve that growth: a strong why for both the CEO and for the executive team. If that strong desire doesn’t exist, exponential growth likely won’t be pursued.
In terms of helping the team build that desire, Robinette finds it helpful to get the CEO and executive team on the same page. A team might be executing an old strategy with the best of intentions, trying to keep the lights on by completing day-to-day operations the way they’ve always done them. However, if the CEO has a vision of growth, that might not be in alignment with the team’s commitment to routine.
The first step then is to ensure the CEO and the executive team are on the same page with where they want to take the company. That way, it’s not just about growth. It’s about creating a healthy environment where the CEO and the executive team are not overly stressed out, and the employees are part of an environment in which they are set up for success. Finally, these components help create a culture that celebrates small wins—it can’t always be stressful and painful. The process of growing together needs to be something that’s also fun to do.
Engaging Employees for Success
If a company has a strong executive team, and understands their why, interrogating the next phase for growth and scaling can still present challenges.
Often, it depends on what is happening in the company, in terms of how varying areas of strengths and weaknesses impact a company’s ability to expand. But as a whole, it is crucial to get employees engaged in the business, Robinette advises. According to Forbes, approximately 61% of employees are burned out on their job. One potential area of improvement requires getting all employees engaged in the business. Disengaged employees cost U.S. companies $550 billion a year, and highly engaged teams actually have a 21% greater profitability. “If there’s a place to start,” says Robinette, “you start with people…everybody likes to win, and it’s nice when you’re in a good culture and a happy, healthy environment. So that’s the first thing.”
Employees may quit for a variety of socially-related reasons: they may not like their boss, or another person inside their organization. However, the company’s culture also impacts employees’ retention. Working for a company where it’s difficult to get anything done inside the company can create a painful atmosphere devoid of fun. In order to create healthy environments where people are actually engaged and enjoying it, leaders have to be trained, and processes implemented for workers to really be happy on the job.
Robinette’s Strategy
Since every company has its own culture, the way to impact change from one company to another inevitably varies. “The one thing I’ll say is that with all the tools that I have at my disposal, I let the company actually pick and choose what they actually want to apply inside of their company,” Robinette shares. “For instance, I have one company that I’m working with right now, that I think meeting cadence is something that you just have to master. If you don’t have that down, it’s painful. Everybody hates going to the meetings. And yet, this company actually had a very efficient meeting cadence. We taught them the processes around what the best practices look like, but then we let them adapt which best practices they liked the most, which they applied.. We didn’t just say, “Just do it like this.” Getting the people to buy into the process without losing your culture, if it’s a good, positive culture, is actually really important.”
The RevX formula is Robinette’s combination of several tools to help companies grow exponentially and r create healthy organizations. The formula consists of tools that are tactical in nature, strategic tools implemented alongside the development of a strategic plan, and cash tools, which are associated with making sure a company is achieving the right profitability.
We work with companies in order to help them grow exponentially and actually see a vision for how to achieve that growth with people that are highly engaged, and a strategy that is fun and fulfilling, and then executed into a larger vision with a purpose. It’s one thing to have the vision, says Robinette. But if the people don’t buy into it, or are not that excited about it, it’s really challenging.
Generating enough cash in order to fuel the company is crucial, alongside all the tools necessary to help create a healthy company that runs in a more efficient way. But the last piece is really working with a team to not only buy in to the plan, but to believe and create that strong desire around why they’re actually pursuing what they’re pursuing. What is that big goal?t It can’t just be the CEO saying, ‘I want to achieve exponential growth,’ but the team saying, ‘I’m behind this for this reason’? The RevX formula engages these various tools in order to both achieve sustainable growth as well as create healthy companies with fun environments and purpose-driven success.
If you are interested in learning more about Robinette’s work and how he might help your company, visit dalerobinette.com.
