Dana Hayes-Burke of DHB Vision Strategists On 5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business
An Interview With Ken Babcock
How to manage your cash flow.
Growth swallows your cash, which is one of the most important business principles I’ve ever learned. As a result, before scaling, make sure your cash flow estimates are reliable and safe.
Startups usually start with a small cohort of close colleagues. But what happens when you add a bunch of new people into this close cohort? How do you maintain the company culture? In addition, what is needed to successfully scale a business to increase market share or to increase offerings? How can a small startup grow successfully to a midsize and then large company? To address these questions, we are talking to successful business leaders who can share stories and insights from their experiences about the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business”. As a part of this series, we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Dana Hayes-Burke.
Dana Hayes-Burke is the CEO of DHB Vision Strategists. She is a Vision Strategist, Business Coach and International Conference Speaker who helps business owners to refine their business model so that they can scale up, make more profit while living their ideal life design. She has helped entrepreneurs in the Caribbean, US and UK to achieve this and is on a mission to help small businesses to move from hustler to true CEO status. Dana Hayes-Burke is known for all things vision, business strategy and leadership.
Thank you for joining us in this interview series. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’?
I’ve always had a strong interest in business. I had always considered running my own business to be a step toward creating the life I had in mind. Thankfully, I’ve had a lot of success there. Now, my goal is to assist others in making the transition from hustler to CEO. I’ve discovered that while we all start out in business with high hopes, many lose their path. I’m on a quest to show them the way forward with simplicity and clarity. I work with business owners to improve their business models so they can grow their enterprises, increase their earnings, and lead more fulfilling lives.
You’ve had a remarkable career journey. Can you highlight a key decision in your career that helped you get to where you are today?
This most strategic move that I made was choosing to start my own business. It was a risk but a calculated one and without making that move, I would not have the company that I presently own and operate.
What’s the most impactful initiative you’ve led that you’re particularly proud of?
Working with three large organizations in my nation to create a summer program for teenagers focused on entrepreneurship and life skills has been one of the most influential things I’ve done in recent years. The fact that it gives these youngsters the tools to implement their ideas and form positive habits is what makes me so passionate about it and why I think it is a worthwhile endeavor. Children and teenagers who are given new information, tools, and habits may not fully understand them while they are young, but they will undoubtedly be able to make better decisions as they get older. It is a seed planted for their prosperous future.
Sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a mistake you’ve made and the lesson you took away from it?
I’ve come to realize that you can learn more from your mistakes in business and in life than you can from your accomplishments. When I first started my consulting business, one of my biggest errors was trying to automate before I fully understood the procedure. Always strive to comprehend the process first, including what functions well and what doesn’t. You risk automating systems that aren’t beneficial to your company if you try to automate before you fully grasp the process. Before you begin automating your processes, understand your business and how they actually operate.
How has mentorship played a role in your career, whether receiving mentorship or offering it to others?
Throughout my entire career, mentoring has been really important. Without mentorship, I would have undoubtedly made a lot more mistakes in my life than I did. And now that I think about it, those errors would have had a significant reputational risk. I’ve come to realize that while lost money can be recovered, a person’s reputation is the hardest to restore. I’ve had mentorship in the areas of leadership, company operations, and strategic planning. As a result, I have also dedicated myself to mentoring others in the area of soft skills, with a focus on life skills for success in your business and profession.
Developing your leadership style takes time and practice. Who do you model your leadership style after? What are some key character traits you try to emulate?
I support the transformational leadership approach, which emphasizes empowering and inspiring your team to think creatively and develop solutions to realize the vision. I’ve discovered that the transformation leadership style enables you to gain more support, develop a stronger team, get through obstacles more quickly, and succeed. Nelson Mandela, however I don’t necessarily model my leadership after him or her, was a great example of transformational leadership in my opinion. Though the chances were not in his favor, he had a dream of a united South Africa. However, he discovered a point of convergence, a single vision that a country might embrace as a catalyst for the changes and answers he desired to see. This brings me to the final part of your question, the leadership traits I try to emulate. 1. Create a clear vision that others can visualize themselves as a part of. 2. Embody the vision through my actions. People believe what you do more than what you say. 3. Harnessing the right solutions from my team by asking the right questions. 4. Empower and motivate.
Thank you for sharing that with us. Let’s talk about scaling a business from a small startup to a midsize and then large company. Based on your experience, can you share with our readers the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business”? Please give a story or example for each.
- A clear vision and business model.
On the most fundamental level, you should just avoid scaling your firm if you are unsure about your long-term goals. Not simply your product line, but also your company’s positioning, effect, and what it will consistently be known for. After that, you develop your business plan to implement this value offer and the revenue streams. The road map for growing your firm is provided by this. For instance, my business, DHB Vision Strategists, is dedicated to assisting you in seeing, believing in, and constructing your vision. With this in mind, we have a comprehensive business plan that is based on the pillars of Educate, Empower, and Build. Our scaling efforts and the strategic decisions we make for the firm have been influenced by this business model. Without our direction or the GPS coordinates of our target, we would be attempting to scale.
2. The talent or people that you need.
The appropriate individuals are necessary for business expansion! There is absolutely no way that you could scale your business independently or as a solopreneur makes sense in current times. How am I aware? I gave it one shot. I attempted to be everything at first when I first started my consulting business. What’s this? That scaling journey suddenly came to an end because I was stretched too thin by the amount of things I had to do in order to accomplish what I wanted to do. Duplicate yourself, your procedures, and place the right people in the proper positions so that they can work in their areas of genius while you work in yours in order to scale your firm. Additionally, you must be very clear about what you want them to do or be for your business. You won’t be able to attain the results you want from your new talent without that clarity, and you won’t be able to develop the necessary competences. I recall having to be quite specific about the qualities I sought in an administrator when I was expanding my administrative team. This helped me to engage someone with the right experience, and skillset to give me the support I need in my business.
3. How to manage your cash flow.
Growth swallows your cash, which is one of the most important business principles I’ve ever learned. As a result, before scaling, make sure your cash flow estimates are reliable and safe. What I’m trying to say is that you need to make sure you have enough money on hand to pay your bills as you scale up your business activities. When it comes to making arrangements with suppliers, customers, employees, and possibly investors, leaders make the error of focusing more on the income and profit that may be earned through expansion than they do on the money. For me, when I intended to scale up, I planned ahead to make sure that I would have the income security to cover the rise in labor costs for at least six months, and I predicted how I would improve my income with this extra personnel capacity.
4. Processes and Systems.
Documented processes are crucial for consistency as you scale up, just like money is for scaling up. I write down each step of the processes that bring value to the operations of my business, and I also document the method by which we present our value proposition to the market, as I have done at every stage of scaling my firm. To correctly determine where improvements need to be made and where systems need to be streamlined and/or automated, you must be clear about your processes. I can still recall the day I looked to get a service provider to enter my process and provide me a boost with my company’s marketing. In the beginning of my business, I worked with them without having a clear vision of the journey I intended to take my ideal client on. Our marketing efforts had very little success as a result. When I first got frustrated with the outcomes, I assumed that the service provider was simply bad at what they did, and that assumption may have had some merit. However, a key factor in that partnership’s limited success was the fact that I lacked clarity around the method and journey of engaging with the client. Better results would have resulted from that, and scaling would have benefited more. You can’t scale up what you don’t know.
5. How to connect with the right audience.
If you want to scale well, you need to understand marketing or have access to people who execute it correctly. In order to grow your business and deal with the heightened competitive challenges that come with it, marketing is essential. You must choose the appropriate what to market to the best who’s. You must be aware of the finest way to price our sales. In the early phases of my firm, I recall leaning on fundamental academic theory and believing that growing my business would result in economies of scale, which would force me to lower my rates. I immediately discovered that while this idea might apply in some circumstances to the selling of commodities, it most definitely does not apply to my line of work. The folks looking for my services have a price range in mind. By increasing my profit margin, the economies of scale I encountered while developing my business helped it expand. In order to make sure that I am increasing the audience of the right people — the right decision makers — who are searching for the solutions that my company offers, the scale-up marketing strategy is now in place. In order to achieve greater outcomes, I have revised my targeted marketing plan.
Can you share a few of the mistakes that companies make when they try to scale a business? What would you suggest to address those errors?
The largest error a CEO or business owner can make is to scale up without considering capacity. To scale your firm, you must have both vision and zeal, which are essential components of business growth. However, you also need to be aware of your ability to maintain scaled-up operations, particularly during the transitional period. Make sure you have accurate financial predictions for all the adjustments you’re about to make before you even scale. Growth costs money. Therefore, be sure to have a cash acceleration strategy in place to boost cash flow in your company. Get a financial adviser and/or a business coach to guide you through this process and there are four key areas that you need to look at: 1. Your sales cycle 2. Your delivery cycle 3. Your billing/payment cycle 4. Your production/inventory cycle. All these have a significant impact on your cash flow and cash capacity to sustain scaling your business.
Scaling includes bringing new people into the organization. How can a company preserve its company culture and ethos when new people are brought in?
Your company’s ethos should be expressed in everyday speech as well as via everyday deeds. It is impossible to learn and implement all of the policies and procedures when you start at a new organization. What do you do then? To learn exactly what to do, you emulate other people’s behaviors. So, if you grow your company or consider growing your company, be sure that your team’s activities and your own match the fundamental principles of your company.
In my work, I focus on helping companies to simplify the process of creating documentation of their workflow, so I am particularly passionate about this question. Many times, a key aspect of scaling your business is scaling your team’s knowledge and internal procedures. What tools or techniques have helped your teams be successful at scaling internally?
I keep things pretty basic. As I previously stated, I am now scaling my business and have assisted other businesses in doing the same. First, I distribute templates and documents for routine correspondence and business operations inside the company using cloud storage folders. New team members can visit this to manage their roles and comprehend how they fit into the process. Second, I hold regular meetings and make sure that lines of communication are open so that people may voice concerns, offer ideas, and maintain the progress of procedures. It’s critical to make sure that everyone is on the same page because there are more chefs in the kitchen.
What software or tools do you recommend to help onboard new hires?
I make it pretty straightforward, as I have mentioned. I utilize technologies like Trello, our company’s Google Drive, and I’ve just started utilizing Padlet for training because the majority of our workforce works remotely.
Because of your role, you are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your ideas can trigger.
I would start a teen entrepreneur movement. This will most likely result in a lot of innovative solutions for the market, but it will also have the additional benefit of fostering in young people a growth attitude that will make them more successful and productive adults in the future (whether they continue their businesses or not).
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can remain connected with me via my website https://danahayesburke.com and I am also very active on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-hayes-burke-thevisionbuilder/ and Instagram.
This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!
About the interviewer. Ken Babcock is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tango. Prior to his mission of celebrating how work is executed, Ken spent over 4 years at Uber riding the rollercoaster of a generational company. After gaining hands-on experience with entrepreneurship at Atomic VC, Ken went on to HBS. It was at HBS that Ken met his Co-Founders, Dan Giovacchini and Brian Shultz and they founded Tango.
Dana Hayes-Burke of DHB Vision Strategists On 5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.