Interview: David Molian
Growing Your Business
Steve Macaulay
Hello, I am Steve Macaulay. This interview is one of a series where
we interview Cranfield Faculty about their books. In the studio
today is David Molian; now David Molian has co-authored the book
Growing Your Business: A Handbook for Ambitious Owner
Managers.
Now David, give me some idea what led to the book in the first
place.
David Molian
Well, the book is the outcome of 25 years of working with high
growth, owner managed business here at Cranfield and the book in
a way is a compendium that tells their stories.
Steve Macaulay
Let’s pick the first word really, which was growth. Growth is good
seems to be the underlying message of the book, tell me some
more about that.
David Molian
Well growth is certainly good for what we call the ambitious owner
manager, who are the people who come on our Business Growth
Programme here at Cranfield. They represent perhaps one in eight
or one in ten of small business owners who have decided that they
really want to grow their business; so for them, the question is how
do I do this? I have got the drive and the ambition to do it, but I
am not necessarily sure of how to do it and that is really what we
do.
Steve Macaulay
Now, the book poses three questions which seem to run
throughout really, which is where are we now, where are we going
and how do we get there? Let’s take each one of those questions.
Now the first one, where are we now? Now, I am sure you must
get many managers saying to you, come one, I know where I am
now, I don’t need to know that.
David Molian
Well, you might think so. The reality is that often they have a
sense of where they are now, but that sense is a general sense and
perhaps a vague sense. And what we do, we like to describe it as
holding up flat mirrors to our delegates, so we try to get them to
the truth about themselves and their business as quickly as
possible.
If you are an ambitious owner manager and you want to grow your
business rapidly, you want to do so from a firm base. If that
David Molian
foundation has cracks in it, those cracks will become fissures as the
business tries to expand. So it is like building a house on sand –
you don’t want to build a house on sand, you want to build it on
firm foundations. So we need to ensure that the business is in the
required state for growth before they actually embark on the
process. So they have to have the infrastructure, the systems, the
right people in place, in order to support that growth and
development.
Steve Macaulay
Let’s look at this next area, where are we going? That smacks a bit
of strategy and I imagine that is a bit like the plague for small
owner managers that are saying let’s get going.
David Molian
Yes; but if you don’t know where you are going, you won’t know
when you have got there. For many owner managers, ever since
they have started their business they have been in trenches. They
have been wrestling with all the day to day issues of running a
small business and actually getting some clarity about where they
ultimately want to take the business is something that we allow
them to do. We give them the time and the space to think about
it.
We also give them the time and space to think about where they
personally want to go, because the best possible outcome is that
the business journey and the personal journey coincide. So we
want to make sure that they are happy with the destination that
they are looking for. After all, it is great saying I want to be a world
dominant business and so on; if the reality of that means that
somebody has to be on a plane fifty weeks of the year and away
from their home and their family, and they don’t actually want that
outcome, it is important to be clear about that at the outset.
Steve Macaulay
So that comes onto the last question, the third question really, how
do we get there? Tell me some more about that.
David Molian
How do we get there is exactly the same as creating a road map, as
it were. So we know where the destination is, but the devil is in
the details. So what we try to do is to enable people to create a
detailed plan of implementation which will ensure they can go from
where they are now, to where they plan to be and to make sure
that the execution is going to take them in that right direction.
Steve Macaulay
You have alluded to it once or twice already, but owner managers
and the person themselves are very closely intertwined. I notice in
the book that you give some very graphic descriptions of the
meddler, the artisan, the hero – tell me some more about that.
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David Molian
David Molian
Well we have worked with about 1,250 owner managers over the
last 23 years on this programme and we have observed that for
many of them there is a typical journey that they go through – a
number of phases in their business life.
Virtually everybody will start life as an artisan; that is to say that
they spend most of their time doing the doing. So if they set up an
accountancy practice, they spend their time doing accounts for
clients; if they are a plumber, they spend their time plumbing and
so on and so forth.
As time moves on, they spend more and more time on routine
tasks which are essential for running a business. So chasing
customers for payment, for example, negotiating with suppliers,
dealing with their VAT returns, sorting out the IT; all of those daily
chores which anybody who runs a business is familiar with. They
metamorphose into what we would describe as a hero; so they are
the chief problem solver in the business and employees tend to get
into the habit of bringing them problems to solve and the owner
manager solves them. The problem with that, of course, is that it
won’t necessarily grow the business because the focus is just on
the day to day.
The third phase that we find on this journey is that people change
into what we describe as meddlers; so they have reached the limit
of what they can do as heroes and they start hiring more people to
undertake specific professional skilled jobs within the organisation.
So they start to hire sales people, marketing people, procurement
experts - whatever it might be. The tendency for a lot of owner
managers is then to interfere in the jobs that they have recruited
other people to do because they are the people who best
understand how to do those jobs and they become, if you like,
meddlers.
Our mission is to help people progress through the hero and the
meddler stage as quickly as possible and get to what we call
strategist stage, which is to spend significant amounts of time
working on the business, rather than in the business. So planning
the new business for tomorrow. Because unless you free yourself
up to do that, you will always remain trapped in the business that is
today.
Steve Macaulay
Some wise words. If there is anything that you would like to leave
people that might read this book – the owner manager – what
message would you like to leave? I am very conscious that small
businesses have a very high failure rate; equally, some of the UK’s
most successful businesses now started off as small businesses and
they have risen very rapidly.
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David Molian
David Molian
Well you are right Steve, because seven out of ten small businesses
will go out of business within ten years of starting up, so the failure
rate is high.
I guess there are two thoughts I would like to leave you with. One
is that for any owner manager, who is ambitious about growing
their business, they are going to run a marathon, they are not going
to run a sprint and they need to take account of that. So
periodically on that journey they will get tired, they will need to be
refreshed, they will need to find new sources of energy to pick
themselves up and take them through to the next stage.
The second thing I think I would leave you with is the thought that
change is constant and the pace of change is probably faster than it
ever was today in business. So the business that you started in
year one is not going to look the same in year five, and it certainly
isn’t going to look the same in year ten. So, if you are an ambitious
owner manager and you are going to set out on that marathon you
have to be prepared for change.
Steve Macaulay
David, thank you very much.
David Molian
It is a pleasure.
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