The Blaze

The Blaze Situation

The Blaze: rising sales and profits! The company is strong, gaining more market share, with both rising sales and profits. Customer loyalty is high, which is reflected in the repeat sales. You might have already started creating new businesses or independent business units. This is the best stage for mergers and/or acquisitions.

There is a balance between the entrepreneurial spirit and the control of the business. There is alignment between Vision, Strategy, Structure, Information, Resource Allocation and Rewards. You have also assigned someone to Audit Functional Systems and Structures. Decision-making is made more intelligently with composure and peace of mind. You now only accept customers who meet the criteria of your ideal client, and the team understands their roles in the business and work by priorities. In a culture of mutual trust and respect, clients, as well as employees, are treated with care.

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▼ The Blaze Problems

The 3 main problems you might face here are:

Insufficient management training – soft skills could be improved to better lead the team and get the best out of people.
The need to institutionalise the governance process so that the employees understand how decisions are made and can contribute to them.
And if you are a technology company, you might find that you are not achieving optimised innovation – that is controlled and profitable innovation. This is the case with wrong power structures: power lies with Technology and R&D mainly, and not enough with Production, Delivery and Financial Control.

In the Blaze, there are not many issues – however, the biggest challenge you will face is to keep the momentum. You might settle into thinking you are safe, but you are silently letting competition and external factors smother you.

If you take advantage of the current momentum instead of feeding into it, your growth rate will start declining – this will be the end of fiery Blaze and the beginning of the Combustion.

> Take the test and find out if you are in The Blaze! <

▼ The Blaze Consequences

The team relies on what has worked in the past and starts to lose desire to improve/change or create something new. There is a sense of security and a mindset of “if not broken, no need to fix it”. This will be reflected in your new products: they are enrichments, rather than ground-breaking novelty.

The meetings focus on whether something should be done or not, rather than if something has already been done. Watch out for an increase in overheads as a percentage of revenue as opposed to increase in direct costs.

To maximise profits you start cutting on advertising, promotions and R&D. This erodes the creative and flexible side of the company. The innovative people of your team will unsuccessfully attempt to initiate change, and will eventually stop trying and leave (or get fired).

> Take the test and find out if you are in The Blaze! <

▼ How can we help?: The Blaze Solution

The first challenge is to reach the Blaze phase. The second challenge is to remain in the Blaze phase. If you do not do what you supposed to do in this phase, you are risking developing abnormal problems which will later become pathological. We will help you take advantage of the momentum and challenge the status quo by:

Finance:

Set up Financial and Information Management System to help you measure the value of critical project and their outcomes to help you innovate, reduce waste, identify funding opportunities and accelerate cash.
Focus the team on supporting the commercialisation of new products and ideas.
Individual and company Performance Measurement linked to company objectives and priorities.
Set up KPI system to provide insight into the past and future performance.
Act as a custodian of assets and value protection.
Focus the Finance function on value creation.
Work with the business to ensure compliance and effective Financial Control
Cash Acceleration Strategies – shorten the cash conversion cycle, eliminate mistakes and improve your business model and P&L.

Human Resources:

Develop a Reward System linked to measuring creativity and innovation and knowledge.
Set up System for ongoing education and learning.
Train, Coach and Mentor your management team to better lead others.
Employee Engagement – increase employee exposure, autonomy, skills, role significance and employee feedback.
Create Culture of Innovation that nurtures new ideas.
Create winning teams with common set of values, working together towards common goal.
Develop leaders in the organisation to aid explosive growth using our unique methodologies for growing businesses.
Create forward force with motivation, empowerment and high morale in the team.
Establish collaboration between creative teams in marketing, product development and operations.
Align the HR processes and activities with the Core purpose and values.
Coach and hold executives and mid-managers for behaviour changes.

Operations:

- Make the Core Values and Purpose “alive” in the organisation.
- Bring back the Lost Urgency with focusing the whole organisation on the number one priority each quarter to move the company forward.
- Align the New Product Development Process with a corresponding power structure balancing the opposing forces of creativity and control, innovation and commercialisation as well as market and technology.
- Create ad-hoc collateral structures for Brainstorming or Problem-Solving, including forums, retreats etc. with diverse members. Set up Internal networks and external networks with suppliers and customers.
- Codify and capture learning generated form ad-hoc collateral structures and from product development teams, so learning is not lost and mistakes not repeated.
- Increase customer value by identifying opportunities and problems with frequent and accurate reporting and analysis system of customer data.

> Take the test and find out if you are in The Blaze! <

Organisation:

Create flat structure by broadening responsibilities of staff at each level to allow employees to see the “bigger picture” and prevent distortion of the message that must pass through levels.
Design a company that responds quickly and flexibly to ideas that represent opportunities for potential growth.
Systemise decision-making by implementing task-based structure and institutionalised systems of governance ensuring the entrepreneurial spirit is captured and protected.
Sustain the momentum within the organisation to increase its effectiveness, by unifying winning teams with the vision and focus on what could be done rather than what could not be done.
Institutionalise the Governance Process to prevent development of wrong structures.
Re-organise and Decentralise the mid-management to nurture the vitality of the creative and entrepreneurial spirit, avoiding disintegration of the teams.
Set up the right Power Structure with clear accountability to prevent complacency.
Management Systems Accreditations

IT Operations

Creating a secure, scalable and agile IT Infrastructure to accomplish efficiencies, business continuity and company asset protection.

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