Focused Structure

Why is second stage growth so hard for businesses to achieve? They take off like a rocket, grow like crazy, and steal business from bigger competitors every step of the way. Then all of a sudden, they find the growth slowing, profitability slipping, and people in the company fighting with each other, and they just can't seem to get ahead of it.If this sounds familiar, welcome to Whitewater.

The second stage in the Predictable Success Lifecycle is Fun. It's an incredible time for the business. During this time, businesses often achieve double-digit and triple-digit annual growth as they break free from gravity and rocket out of Early Struggle. Here's how to make the most of it!

Do you ever just wish you could see around the "next corner" for your business? Have you ever been blindsided by a major challenge that seemed to come out of nowhere? But in hindsight, you realized it had been brewing for a long, long time; you just didn't see it coming.

Day two of your executive offsite is where the rubber meets the road and where discussion transforms into action! You’ll pick up right where you left off in day one, with goals. As the day progresses, you and your team will get increasingly precise until you've boiled those goals down to the specific, actionable tasks that you can assign to your team members.

There are six common traps that founders and entrepreneurs unknowingly fall prey to during the early days of their new business. The first step to avoiding them is knowing that they exist.

As humans, we grow up, reach our prime, and then walk the road of wisdom as a simple function of time. In other words, we grow old. However, businesses don't face the same sort of mandatory aging. Instead, your business can, in theory, stay in top form for as long as you'd like. Here's how you and your business can defy the laws of gravity for as long as you (and even your successors) would like!

How fast do you want to grow your business? As your business progresses through each stage of growth, you will need to strategically decide whether you are willing to make the changes necessary to keep growing.

Where does growth come from, incremental gains, or quantum leaps? There are so many articles written on this question, and they come to virtually every single conclusion. I'd like to take a moment to try to explain why the answer is "YES" and what that means for your business.

If your business growth was once booming but has since slowed, where do you think you should look first? Pricing? Nope. Costs? Nope. Marketing content? Nope. You may have problems in all three of these areas and probably have a lot of problems in other areas too.

Though spikes and disruptions will hit and the future is far from clear, many businesses would benefit from taking a step back to reassess not only their long-term goals but also the process by which we establish those goals. This is one of those areas that, if was as leaders are not intentional, we could end up suffering from a side-effect of COVID-19 for a very long time: a heightened emphasis on urgency.