To Fly First, Get Grounded

If you run a B2B Tech business, you want to grow and you want to grow fast. Your business requires it, your investors demand it, and you just wanna do it right. You’re ready, you see what’s possible. So let’s go. I want to encourage you to make sure that before you hit the gas pedal, you have built a solid, grounded foundation for your business that will give you the anchor, the strength that you need to deal with the changes that will accelerate and amplify with your success. Success can kill a business almost as often as failure or lack of success does. So here are three suggestions for you, things to think about and make sure you’ve got that solid foundation built, which will enable you to grow as fast and as far as you can.

1. Meaning
First, and this won’t surprise you. Meaning I think is just an essential component of your business foundation. By meaning, I mean, what’s your purpose? Why are you here? Why did you either create the business or decide to lead this business? That purpose is what will tie your team together now, but it also will help hold them together as you grow and scale, because the bigger you get, the easier it is for things to unravel and for personalities in your business to just get outta control. Also, your focus of your business, the operations, the target, all those things are really an essential piece of that. Meaning you’re doing something for someone. So that meaning is the linkage between who it’s for what you do and how they benefit.

You may think you know what that is, but does everybody else know it or is it just in your brain? So this takes effort and patience for you to install this meaning into your team, make it from your meaning to shared meaning. And once you do that, the next step is to spread it, infect your customers with that as well. But when your team’s on board first, that gets easy no matter how big you get.

2. Focus
Okay. Second important piece of your foundation, your grounding is focus. So many times I speak with CEOs and we talk about who their product is for, and their first, their kneejerk reaction is, how broad can I make that? Because that makes my target market bigger and I don’t wanna leave people out.

It’s scary to have something that’s only for this one audience. I have found that it’s much better and much more powerful foundation for your business when you start very specifically with a very specific target market. Let’s call ’em a bullseye market. The ones that it’s your sweet spot, right? The ones that, oh my gosh, they know right away what you’re about, and they want some right focus there. You can always widen the lens, but it’s a lot harder to, to undo all the activity and the different distractions if you don’t start small.

3. Value
And then third value, this whole thing doesn’t work unless your customers need what you have. Not only need it, they demand it, right? It’s, it’s something that they know, they have to have from you or somebody, and you’re the one that can provide it to them.

The opposite of this is being a commodity where they can get what you do from a lot of different places, or worse yet, a fantasy where you think you have something value, but you haven’t confirmed, you haven’t made the linkage to real life, and you are spending a whole lot of effort on something that will never, be profitable for you. So it’s really important upfront to be clear on that ultimate value.

Okay. I am talking about all three of these things because the, the exciting thing is if you put these things in place in your foundation, that’s your destination, and you haven’t fulfilled your meaning yet, you haven’t fully confirmed your focus yet you haven’t fully developed your value yet, but you know what you, where you wanna go, that gives you incredible flexibility. As stuff happens, the market changes, and it does all the time. As we know, technology changes, competitive landscape will shift, geopolitical macroeconomic issues that you never would’ve thought would happen, happen. Having this clear foundation that’s pointed at a destination gives you the ability to adjust the journey however needed without losing sight of why we decided to do this in the first place. So, I encourage you to ground yourself. It’s worth the time. It’s worth the effort so you and your team can stay on task no matter what happens.