Madron Farming success story. Most small-to-medium-sized business owners want to grow their company and its imprint on their chosen market. What some fail to recognise is that as a business grows then so do the challenges. Larger companies are much more complex and if business owners do not keep up, they risk becoming victims of their own success.
This was highlighted to me when Charlie Jenkin from Madron Farming, a lettuce and herb producer and supplier in the Western Cape, enlisted GROW’s coaching services to help him expand his business. What struck me was that even though Charlie expressed a desire to grow the concern, he was unable to find the time to strategically work on the business and plan ahead, since he was just too involved in the company’s day-to-day operations.
What Charlie needed clarity on, was, as a business owner, the key to successfully steering your business through a growth phase is to ensure you have the time to focus on growth activities such as planning, building capacity and concentrating on strategy work.
In instances like these, my priority as a coach is to ensure that the business leaders I work with get as much support as possible from their staff. So very early on into the process I look to create an additional level of leadership within the business. Each company I have encountered has individuals who are smart, hardworking and both willing and able to take on team leadership roles that support the owner. With Madron, we quickly identified the functions and areas where Charlie needed help and, similarly, the people within the organisation who could fulfil these roles.
Creating teams for growth
Capable and accountable teams are crucial to business owners who want to work ON their business rather than IN them. I showed Charlie that if he focused on his most important asset, his workforce, and structured it correctly then he would have a lot more time to work on the key areas in his business that related to expansion and growth. We focused on six key points he would need to work on to get this right.
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Create small efficient teams
The first thing was to create small, yet distinct and well-managed teams – see my blog, Building a Winning Management Team – capable of fulfilling specific roles in the business. The best size team, according to research, comprises no more than five people. These teams are efficient and agile enough to fulfil their key roles.
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Skills diversification
Charlie needed to ensure a diversification of skills and tasks within his workforce, and abilities that would support future growth and the complexities and specialisations required to ensure success in this crucial phase. This required us to identify the different skills and specialisations needed to fulfil different company functions and then to divvy out these responsibilities to the different teams.
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Functional accountability
Once these teams are in place and have been given the right tasks as per their unique skillsets and against which they need to be held accountable, each team member is reviewed regularly to ensure they are delivering on their key objectives.
Side note: my role as a coach in this process is to help business owners and leaders to identify essential functions in their business and then to determine who should be accountable for that function. Having one person head up a key function within the business promotes diversification of effort and efficiency, and ensures that there is one person, other than the head of the company, who is taking responsibility for that function. The key to this is ensuring that the person who is held accountable has a history of living the company values and is one of the company’s A-players.
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Ongoing training, feedback, and support
As a business grows there is an increased need for mentorship and guidance. There is mounting evidence of a direct link between an employee’s engagement and quality of output, and the frequency of the productive interaction that they have with their peers, line managers, and bosses.
It was in this area where Charlie really excelled and where his effort produced phenomenal results quickly. Through his dedication and discipline to having individual sessions with his colleagues, he was able to galvanise the team. The time he spent doing this gave him the opportunity to get to know his people better, and to discuss their careers and work. The result is that each of his team members has grown both personally and professionally.
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Creating engaged employees
Business owners and team leaders must show the people within the organisation that they care about them and value their contribution. They need to ensure each person knows exactly what function they fulfil and how they are contributing to the business. To do this scorecards, dashboards and performance data help confirm each person’s performance.
To support the performance discussion the Madron leadership team agreed complete their personal job scorecards. Each scorecard details what each person is accountable for including an objective measurement detailing the standard expected for each job. This provides and objective mechanism for Charlie to review his own and his team’s performance. By setting the example, Charlie and his team have shown the rest of the employees a willingness to be accountable to a standard of performance irrespective of their rank in the business.
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Meeting rhythms and information visibility
Checking in with team leaders, and even their teams, is crucial as companies expand. Setting up weekly meeting rhythms with an agenda, selecting a captain (not the boss) to ensure the rhythm happens and is managed, was the next step. These meetings ensure that information and visibility from all perspectives is sought out and communicated in support of the plans for the business.
Organisations that collaborate effectively ensure they have the right mix of sufficiently qualified people in the room to share relevant information and debate perspectives This supports the process of making good decisions. In addition to weekly team meetings, Charlie agreed to schedule quarterly strategy sessions which involved him and his entire leadership team.
The implementation of the above strategies was incredibly time consuming, but once Charlie had the right systems in place he found himself freed up to focus on the work he needed to do to ensure the business grew in line with his vision. He now had more time to focus on his priorities and create a business that was agile enough to operate in uncertain economic times.
Teams, discipline, and structure create strong foundations for growth
Charlies’ story is not unique. Over the years, I have come across many businesses like this. To ensure success, business owners need to develop sound habits to keep the momentum going. But it requires someone to hold the business owner to account. To ensure that the person at the helm is doing what they say they will.
This is the standout reason why most of GROW’s clients say they employed the services of a coach. A coach is a neutral person who can not only facilitate the processes being implemented, but also hold the business owner to account. This makes sure the urgent day-to-day occurrences do not derail the business owner’s strategic focus on growing the business.
As Madron has expanded, Charlie has developed increasingly complex and more significant ways to deal with the challenges that invariably come along when growing a business as rapidly as he is. These systems have stood him and Madron in good stead. The COVID pandemic stress-tested just how strong Madron Farming’s foundations are. I am pleased to say that the business has weathered the storm and has continued its growth path despite the trials of 2020.
@GrowCoachingSA