adminHow do you turn a startup into a thriving enterprise? That is the question Les McKeown, serial entrepreneur, best-selling author and the CEO and founder of consulting firm Predictable Success sought to answer in his lively keynote address at the first Entrepreneur360 Conference in New York.
In a speech accompanied by only a permanent market and two giant pads of paper, McKeown broke down the seven stages of development every business faces:
1. Early struggle: The company’s founders are searching for a sustainable and profitable market.
2. Fun: This involves mining the market the founders have found, solving problems as they arise and not being afraid to improvise.
3. White water: The company starts to make mistakes. Quality of the product or service may decrease and often there is a move hire someone to deal with the new, more complex company processes.
4. Predictable success: The team comes together and focuses on scaling the company.
5. Treadmill: When the founders sell or move on, the CEO moves to a position like chairman emeritus.
6. The big rut: With a lack of vision, the company can struggle to stay relevant.
7. Death rattle: The end of the line.
Mr McKeown developed his model for how to successfully build a company thanks to hard won experience, having started 42 businesses before he turned 35.
Besides detailing every business’s life-cycle and what occurs at each stage, Mr McKeown touched on the three types of people you’ll find in a start-up environment and how their relationships to one another shift as the company grows and changes.
For more on the danger of glorifying the start-up mentality, the importance of knowing when to scale and why visionary founders can sometimes have the attention span of a golden retriever, check out the full keynote speech in the video above. — Wires.
Online Reporter