Stage Right
Make smarter management decisions by knowing what stage your company's in.
For Darlene Pinkowski, all the business world's a stage.
When she's mulling over strategies for Actoras Consulting Group
Inc., the 20-person Schaumburg, Illinois, management consulting
firm she co-founded, a key question is: What stage of growth is
this business in?
At the start-up stage in 1993, Actoras consisted of two
employees and an idea. At that point, Pinkowski's goal was to
give the company a reason for existence. "The first important
stage was picking our strategy," she says, "who we are,
where we want to be, how we are going to get there."
The next two years, the goal was to fine-tune marketing and
generate sales. After that, with revenues growing consistently, the
company was ready to move into a new phase aimed at increasing
capacity.
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"In 1996, we spent money internally, bringing in more
skilled people and setting up practice areas so we could provide
services across industries," says Pinkowski. "Now in
1997, we're back to marketing and sales and, more specifically,
recruiting."
Experts in small-business growth say Pinkowski is on the right
track in trying to relate her management decisions to her
business's position in the cycle of growth. The idea is that it
takes different tools to succeed when you're starting out than
it does after you've become more established. Fitting the cycle
of a business's life into sequential stages of growth can help
entrepreneurs be alert to problems they're likely to encounter,
prepare with the proper skills and resources for each stage, and
realize when old ways of doing things are no longer
appropriate.
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