DY NA M IC
JOU R N E Y
#1 BELIEVE IN YOURSELF AND THINK BIGGER
When it comes to male vs female led businesses, females under index in successful owner-operator businesses. The facts from last year’s Rose Report show that fewer women start their own businesses, and when they do, less of them sustain them long-term and worse still, far less scale them up. In fact, men are five times more likely to grow their businesses to over a £1m turnover than women. Having run Something Big for over twenty years and scaled it from the kitchen table to being ranked in the Top 100 independent agencies in the UK, I reflected on our growth journey to share my learnings in this article. Noting it’s always a lot easier with the benefit of hindsight!
There’s no doubt we could have scaled quicker if I had been more confident. To begin with the business was a lifestyle choice, I had three children in the first 10 years of running the business and that’s not something you can do in your lunch break but even taking this into account, I’m not sure why we weren’t more audacious with our original vision. In hindsight, I’d encourage my female counterparts to dream bigger from the start. Think about what you feel you’re capable of and then add a bit more – you’re likely to be selling yourself short.
#2 PHONE A FRIEND
Over the years, I’ve worked with a series of mentors, coaches, non-exec directors, advisors and CEO groups. They’ve all served a purpose, giving me invaluable insight into how to approach things differently, sharing their experiences and perspectives
and more often than not, encouraging me to ‘lean in’ and go for it. I see no shame in not having the answers or needing help. My reflection would be that we need not just advice but sometimes a sharp kick in the backside, to be brave and leave our comfort zones.
#3 EMBRACE FAILURE
If you haven’t already read up on ‘growth and fixed mindsets’ don’t hang about, get Googling and read up on how to accept failure as a part of the journey to success. It might sound like the cheesiest thing you’ve read, but seriously scaling up a business requires failure and quite literally, if you’re not failing at anything you’re potentially not trying hard enough. Call it test and learn if it makes you feel better, but trust in the fact that your male counterparts, in other businesses, have likely learnt to fail fast and are scaling up as a result.
Burning out is a real obstacle for growth so take your time, you don’t have to win the race today, remember the hare and the tortoise 24