Winston-Salem Business Magazine - October 2007 - (Page 11) BUSINESS Front It’s critical to make the right choice for you, because no man’s land is no fun. applauding. They start complaining: “The only way I can get things done is talk to you.” You put salespeople out there and they make promises, but they’re the wrong promises. Sales and operations are at each other’s throats because there’s no alignment between the two. Meanwhile, the customers don’t find it simple to do business with you anymore. That’s my definition of a market-driven business: one that allows customers to get what they want in a very simple exchange. So how do you make the exchange simple again? How do you get sales and operations realigned? There are two ways to do it. One is to go back to where you were before. The other is to push on through to the end of no man’s land, which means building an organization that can do on a larger scale what you used to do on your own. It’s critical to make the right choice for you, because no man’s land is no fun. You’re going to have to make some excruciating decisions, particularly about people. You’re going to have tremendous problems raising capital. You might never make it to the other side. No matter what happens, the experience will have a profound effect on you and everyone around you. So you’d better be sure the journey will be worth the pain. You also better be sure that it’s mathematically possible for the company to get through no man’s land. What’s really stupid is to force a business built around an entrepreneur, or around a human-scale concept, into a transition that will make it economically unviable. If you can’t come up with a scenario under which the company becomes profitable again, you’d have to be crazy to go forward. Management becomes very important. The entrepreneur thinks, “Omigosh, I can’t do all this. I have these customers asking me to do things, and I need an organization that can deliver.” The problem is, you don’t have the right people in your organization. You have the people who started out with you and whom you promoted, giving them titles because you couldn’t pay them. Your senior accounting person is now your CFO. Your top salesperson is your vice president of sales. And trust me, those titles are very important compensation to people. But now you need people who know what to do before the big increase in sales because of their experience. They aren’t learning on the job. Well, you can’t get those people unless you can give them the top title, and somebody else already has it. That person has to be replaced. If you’re going to make the passage through no man’s land, you can’t afford the risk of having senior managers who have never been where you’re going. The challenges you’ll encounter are the most difficult in business—much more difficult than those faced by larger companies because you can’t afford big mistakes. A couple of them will kill you, and they usually come in this part of the process, the people part. So now you’re faced with the absolutely most wrenching, emotionally draining, cruel decision that any person ever has to make. How do you tell people who believed in you when you started, who stayed with you when you didn’t have any money to pay them, who did everything you asked—how do you tell them they’re not capable of doing what the company needs? I mean, it’s brutal.” says Tatum. “There is actually one function you probably can’t transfer to the whole organization. It’s important to preserve the entrepreneurial ability and get the company behind it. If you lose it, you’re going to be busted every four or five years, when you need to come up with a new value proposition. I think of it in terms of messing things up and then cleaning up the mess. By messing things up, I mean making new promises to customers that keep you aligned with the market as it changes. Those promises mess up the organization because it doesn’t yet know how to fulfill them, which is very frustrating for the operations people. But they need to remember that if the WINSTON-SALEM BUSINESS | 11
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