As CEO, it’s your job to build a business engine and continue to build and enable this engine. It doesn’t mean that you have to be the centre and control everything. If you make all the decisions, you may the bottleneck to your company’s growth.

In building your business are you focussing on what really makes your business work?
Is it clear to everyone in your team, what it takes to generate sales, delivery your services and grow happy customers?

Define and operate according to a process. Encourage people to continually experiment and test new and better ways. Know how your operate at your current level of business and understand how it will scale.

As CEO, as your business scales, you have your business engine and processes defined so that you can be removed from every stage, at the appropriate time. Then you can really focus on enabling your business to grow rather than control every fine detail.

I thoroughly enjoyed Jerry Kennelly’s talk last night at the it@Cork Summer Event in Murphy’s Brewery.

In StockByte, Jerry established a clear vision and opportunity early on and went after it fabulously and whole heartily with great success. That is $135M worth of success when Jerry sold his companies last year.

With the vision at the very start and quickly establishing that they were ahead of the market, Stockbyte established themselves as market leaders and acted accordingly. StockByte were innovative on business model, marketing, delivery of their offering and collecting feedback from the market.

I really really liked:
1) how they marketed the ‘personality’ of the business to set them apart.
2) the constant objective to drive more streamlined scaleable business across the entire business
3) the fast response feedback loop to generate new product directions
4) the focus on high quality, high value and premium service at a relevant high margin price
5) the fast pace
6) the fun of it all, constant innovation coupled with constant business growth, there’s nothing better!

Well done Jerry.

This story and how Jerry delivers it should be bottled and used by Enterprise Ireland as one potential model in building an international successful business. BUT it’s definitely a lesson that it’s well achievable with the right mindset to start with.

I’m going back to work.

also see great write-up on the event at http://www.waveson.com/itcork-and-jerry-kennelly/trackback/

To carry on the theme of certainty from a previous blog post, facing reality allows us to plan for making the best of it. Being more certain is about leaving less to chance or luck. Reality is the best basis to build our plans on. (Definition of Reality: When you stop believing in it, it’s still there)

Reality can frighten the life out of people. Courage is required. (Definition: Courage is not the absence of fear, but realizing there’s something more important). Ignoring realities leaves things to chance. Facing realities provides greater certainty.

You can only prepare for what’s to happen if you accept that it can happen, good and bad. You are more certain to make things happen for you if you face reality early and prepare.

- Understand the client need
- Understand how your offering solves that need
- Understand the buying decision and process, the decision makers, influencers etc
- Define how will implement your solution

When you face realities early you can appreciate possibilities and act fast.

We can always reap greater rewards if we are prepared for all the good things that can happen and conversely if we are prepared for the bad things we can manage it better.

The two sides of not facing reality are, probably, Over Optimism and Panic, whereby we are over-reacting to some information that may not be reality that brings us to bad decisions and missed opportunities to progress.