Mike Clark's Business Bites: Ceiling for business growth set by people

Do you have personal development plans or a skill matrix for your team? Photo / Unsplash

Do you want to grow your business? Have you tried various methods with limited success? Ever wondered if there is a magical shortcut to business growth?

I work with a lot of high-growth businesses and am often asked what one thing can a business owner do to grow their business. I'll pop any burgeoning bubbles of hope up front - there is no magical one thing. I do have a top pick.

Certainly there are common answers if you were to search online or ask experts – culture is an obvious answer, clear strategy, decisiveness and bias to action help a business grow fast. Buying other businesses can be a rapid shortcut up the ladder of growth (the cultural integration can be a fraught bag of snakes!), innovation, entering new markets – all these work.

However, as anyone in business will tell you, these are not magic bullets – they constitute hard work across multiple parts of any business.

When pushed to pick one I preface my answer with the top runner-up. Companies with a clear vision, strategy and plan, combined with decisiveness and bias to action are on the inside fast track to success. In a short-distance run my money would be on these businesses to win. Business, however, is not a short run. Successful businesses ride through the highs, lows, lulls and storms of the decades.

Great businesses are in it for the long haul. If you are in it for the long haul put your money on your people.

Any business can only grow to the level of its people. Whether a sole trader or employing hundreds of people, the ceiling for business growth is set by the capability of the people. Grow your people and you will grow your business.

Peter Senge identified companies that did this well and coined the phrase learning organisations to encapsulate the attitude of continuous learning these businesses embodied.

When was the last time you learnt something new to grow your business? When was the last time you sent your team for training? Do you have personal development plans or a skill matrix?

Investing in people often raises the concern of staff then leaving. As Peter Drucker so eloquently points out: "If you think training is expensive, try ignorance."

In 2014, Sir Richard Branson advised businesses to "train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough, so they don't want to". Grow your people and they will help you grow your business.

+ Mike Clark is director and lead trainer and facilitator at Think Right business training company.