We’re not talking about calendar years. We’re talking about your company’s stage of business maturity. We call toddler companies “start ups”. We call adult companies “publicly traded” or “where my parents shopped” or “big companies like Apple”.
We don’t really have a label for a company that is in late adolescence. We know ‘em when we see them. They’ve been stalled on a revenue sandbar for years. It’s the poor guy/gal who works 70 hours a week and misses all the dance recitals. She’s always putting out fires. He’s late to every meeting and every day is worse than yesterday.
Here’s the part that breaks my heart. Many of the business owners running these teenage companies are resigned to their fate. “I guess working six days a week is what it means to be an entrepreneur,” is the story they tell themselves. Or even more painful to me, they blame themselves… “Those other folks are obviously better business owners than me.”
Do we blame the teenager for needing braces and suffering a bad case of acne? Do we fault the adolescent for their raging hormones? No, we say it’s just a phase they’re going through. And it’s just like that for a lot of businesses.
I help teenager companies enter adulthood. If you want your grow in your leadership to help your company to behave and act like an adult, call me. I help my clients reap the rewards of business maturity.
