20110722

Risk Averse Is The Biggest Risk Of All

Let me tell you about a company I’m working with. For confidentiality let’s call them Blueberry Hill for this blog post. Blueberry has five Directors and make decisions on a consensual basis. They are all hitting their fifties and when I first went to see them they all had a shared ambition to exit in three to five years time. But (and this was a big but), they had no plans to grow the business in a way that would enable them to realise that shared dream. Why? Because they were risk averse and their product offerings had consequently grown stale. They thought they were swimming hard but they were just treading water.

I sat down with them, and they talked me through how they wanted to realise X million out of the business. Then I talked them through how, on their current growth path, they were not going to get anywhere near achieving their dreams. 

Expanding horizons
That got their attention. Now they were interested enough to spend some time and energy thinking creatively. Thinking about what else they could do, what they could change, how they could capture more market share and crucially how they could engineer an increase in profitability. That led to a really fascinating session where they moved radically into widening their horizon from Business to Business commerce to include the Business to Consumer sector. That was new for them!

Blueberry Hill is now well on the way to taking those guys to the place they always dreamed about. That's the difference sitting down for a chat with a creative Financial Director can make.

Fancy a chat, FD Centre style?

Ali

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