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Recommended Reading

Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t

Good to Great is Collin’s follow up to Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, that showed how great companies triumphed over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of the enterprise from the very beginning.   This time around, Collins reveals how good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies can achieve enduring greatness. 

NextStep utilizes Collin’s concepts like Level 5 Leadership, Confront the Brutal Facts, The Hedgehog Concept, and The Stockdale Paradox to help business owners transform their habits and their company’s culture.

Developing a Sustainable Business

To us a sustainable business is one that can continue successfully beyond its current owners and managers.  While the number of firms that achieves this is small, the ability to set the proper stage for sustainability is within every business owner’s grasp.  Achieving it requires success in three areas, developing a healthy business, building shareholder alignment, and creating a workable succession plan.

A healthy business, just like the name implies is about a business that has a growing top line, generates consistent profits and has a healthy balance sheet.  But equally important to the financial results is the investment in building long-term capabilities.  These capabilities include good people, efficient process, and metrics driven management. Our NextStep process is designed to help you make sure you’re building the capabilities needed to take your company to the next level.

If you have one owner in your company, shareholder alignment is never an issue.  But when ownership spreads beyond one owner, alignment becomes vital.  Agreement about the basics is important to the business’ health.  Among the issues owners must address are items such as reinvesting profits versus taking distributions, growing the business versus maintaining it, employment as a right versus a privilege, keeping the business versus selling it.  The process we’ve developed at NextStep uncovers any gaps in alignment and then serves as a bridge to help owners get on the same page.

More often than not, succession is planned the day before the owners decide to exit.  That rarely works.  The key is a strategic process designed to ensure all the elements are in place and proven before the transition event occurs.  From evaluating your successors, to determining how the economics work, to setting performance triggers, the NextStep process ensures the succession plan will work properly.