Transition is the Barrier to Success

The Barrier Is Transition

Transition is defined as the process or a period of changing from one state or condition to another. We are introducing a new concept, the capitalized word Transition, that is the barrier to success.6

Transition with a capital T is a business phase in which an essential aspect of your framework needs to change and how you, as leader, think about how the business needs to change. The way you originally designed your business may now be up in the air. Even how you thought you would get there may be off the table. A leader can get stuck because what used to work, and should work, no longer does in this phase. To con- quer Transition we will show you the red flags and the tools to change your perspective and your outcomes.

Two Kinds Of Transition

In our research, we have found a business will experience two types of Transitions. The first type happens when a company moves from an emerging firm to a professionally managed

firm. If your revenue is between $3 million and $10 million your company is in Transition whether it seems like it or not. The first Transition is the hardest one to deal with because you haven’t the experience yet to manage the paradoxes and noise.

Transition has you straddling the fence between an emerging firm and a professionally managed firm. You are no longer a solo practitioner with one or two staff, making all the key

decisions. Yet, without a full management team, there are not enough staff to delegate tasks. Nor is there enough money to throw at the problems. Your time and attention are being pulled into solving multiple issues simultaneously.

This is the backdrop for Transition, being resource-starved in one, two, or all three critical areas of a business: staff, clients, and cash flow. This resource deprivation affects where one’s focus goes and which problems are resolved, often dragging out the recovery process.

The second type of Transition occurs when a firm’s revenue model (we call it the scalability element) needs to change due an external economic factor. This impacts not only how the company makes money but also the new decisions it must now embrace to do so. So the scalability element and the leadership element need to be upgraded. Usually, a company facing its second transition is well above $10 million in revenue.

In both cases the leadership body (not just the CEO) must newly define how they will manage and think.

The first Transition starts slowly—akin to a frog being heated in a pot of water—and causes all sorts of troubles. Staff just aren’t humming along like they used to—productivity and therefore, profitability starts to suffer. The quality of output tanks. The harder you push for results the worse it seems to get. You may begin to experience staff burn- out leading to greater staff turnover. And so you push even harder for more production to drive down costs while you try to figure out how to drive your revenue up (solving the wrong problem).

The red flags indicating you are in Transition:

• Plateaued sales

• Metrics are not being met

• Your competitors are outstripping you

• Your passion is waning

• Lack of resources

• The four blunders (see below)

To alleviate these unwanted disruptions and getting stuck in a Groundhog Day drama, there are three essential tools we believe will help:

1. A system that increases the value of your firm not just the size

2. A method to promote productivity and profitability

3. A way of thinking and problem solving that sets your company apart—a new focus

Transition changes what the leader should focus on. Without having this awareness, most leaders in Transition typically fall prey to four blunders. These blunders chew up valuable resources, time, money, staff. Embedded in this is knowing the right problem to solve. Albert Einstein once suggested that the thinking that caused the ‘problem’ will not get you out of the problem. He suggested that new thinking, which encourages problems to be viewed dif- ferently, allows for brilliant solutions to emerge.