Phillips Brothers is a family owned business now in its fourth generation of ownership. They specialise in the supply of high-quality horse and poultry bedding. Established in 1894, its ongoing success has been built on smoothly handing the ‘baton’ from one generation to the next. Owner/Director, Jane Knapp recognised that to enable her and the other directors to focus more on growing the business, they need put a management structure in place. To equip their managers to take on these new responsibilities they have enrolled two of the team, including Jane’s son Rhys, on a Level 3 Management Diploma. Jane has also taken advantage of the funding available to undertake a Level 5 Diploma in Leadership and Management. When Rhys asked her why, with all her experience, she was completing the qualification, Jane explained, “You’re never too old to learn!”

There are well-documented differences between start-ups and scale-ups. Recognising these and adapting accordingly can often spell the difference between long-term success and failure for small businesses. Once you have a proven product or service, understand your market and have reached economic sustainability the focus needs to change if you are to ensure continued growth. This includes putting effective systems and procedures in place, increased specialisation of roles and a change in leadership and management focus.

Start-up leadership is entrepreneurial, leads from the front and is involved in almost everything. Once you reach the scale-up stage, the leadership required is very different: no longer do you need to do everything, rather you should be focusing on coaching and developing a team and individual skill sets. One thing that helps facilitate this is putting a management structure in place. However, a management team will only help you to step away from the detail if you trust them to do the job, and one of the best ways of ensuring this is to train your managers for the new responsibilities they are taking on.

There is a famous quote which is commonly misattributed to Darwin: “it is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” This insight is just as true in the world of business as in nature. No matter how well-established your business, the constantly changing environment and marketplace demands that we evolve, not just to survive, but also to thrive.

This need to change spawns projects. Whether it be developing a social media presence, migrating IT to the cloud, adopting agile business processes or investing in new machinery, most SME’s have an extensive ‘to do’ list. Most businesses don’t struggle to change because they don’t know what needs to happen, rather it’s making time to implement the changes required. These change projects often fit into the important but not urgent time management box, and as such end up being neglected until they become both important and urgent. At this point it can become a stressful fire-fight to implement something, anything to keep us from dropping the ball.