At what point can you say that your business has made it? According to Andrew Walsh,
the answer is never. As soon as you take your foot off the pedal, the danger is that you’ll slip back. You have to keep on ratcheting up.
Andrew believes that one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur is to be critical of their creation, but they need to take a regular look at every aspect of it with a detached, objective eye. They need to be their own troubleshooter, and identify two or three things that need to be fixed now. And when they’ve done that, they need to do it again and again.
And entrepreneurs should also be looking for continuous improvement in their own performance. One way he does that is by studying the biographies of leaders he admires in business and politics and identifying any features he can adopt as leader of AW Repair Group.
Andrew is also a firm believer in keeping a keen eye on the wider world, through trusted news channels like Bloomberg and Reuters. It’s a routine that has helped him detect emerging trends in good time and prepare himself and the business to respond accordingly.
It may sound a little premature, but in order to protect your hard-earned success you need to start thinking about succession management. If you’re ultimately looking to sell the business, you’ll need to convince potential buyers that it can continue to flourish without you at the controls. It’s a question of picking the right team, mentoring them and giving them appropriate opportunities.
Sometimes you’ll need to persuade people that they have skills they were unaware of; sometimes you’ll have to, very tactfully, convince them that they don’t have the strengths they think they have.
Once you’ve got the right team, with everyone playing to their strengths, you’ll be able to do the hardest thing of all: letting go.
