Andrea Simon Of Simon Associates Management Consultants On 5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Scale Your Business

An Interview With Ken Babcock

Timing and pacing for growth. Develop realistic time frames. Figure out what is a realistic goal. Then work backward to determine the viability of the goal. Often you will have to adjust that scaling goal as you begin to understand the deliverables at each stage and the complexity to accomplish the goal.

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 Andrea “Andi” Simon, Ph.D.

ANDREA “Andi” SIMON Ph.D., CEO of Simon Associates Management Consultants (SAMC), is an international leader in the growing field of corporate anthropology, an Axiom Bronze Best Business Book of 2017 winning author of On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights, and a major futurist podcast producer for On the Brink with Andi Simon. Andi’s latest book, Rethink: Smashing the Myths of Women in Business, released in 2021, was just awarded the 2022 Axiom Bronze Best Business Book in the Women in Business category. A culture change expert, and an explorer at heart, she is the architect of a global thought leadership platform that blends academic perspectives, depth and breadth of business experience, new-media expertise, and proven success in changing organizations and the people who are the key to their success.

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 have had the opportunity to share my early history in prior Authority Magazine articles. For this topic, I would like to discuss my journey as an anthropologist who helps organizations do something that people hate to do: namely, change. When it comes to scaling a business, the resistance often comes from people not realizing that more of the same, even cheaper, is not an effective strategy. This is particularly the case when the times are changing, and fast. What I have learned in my own career and business developments is to keep my ears open and my eyes scanning the horizon for opportunities that are coming my way.

I discovered anthropology in college. It was by chance, the way I find that so many things come to us serendipitously. I had no intention of becoming a social scientist. I just loved the way anthropology pulls together so many areas of thought, particularly why and how people have done things over the thousands of years in which we have evolved. It did not take me long to take my last year at Columbia University to focus intently on anthropology. Columbia had some of the most amazing faculty. Their insights were transformative. My mind kept expanding, and so many questions emerged as I wondered what this academic field could open for me as a career.

Fortunately, I had a husband who supported my dream of becoming an anthropologist. We were on the beach one day and he asked me, “What do you want to do when you ‘grow up’?” My answer: “Become an anthropologist.” His response: “Terrific, go for it, and I will always be here for you.” I did and he has.

The first part of my career was completing my Ph.D., gaining tenure as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at Ramapo College (now University) in New Jersey, and conducting post-grad research in Greece, along with post-doctoral fellowships in American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I will tell you more about my journey in my next answer.

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?

Once I had my tenure and was publishing articles on my research, I was unexpectedly introduced to a number of Citibank executives at a cocktail party. My husband had joined Citibank just as the banking industry was deregulating. Leadership was hiring packaged goods executives and turning the old-style bank into an innovative one. At this party, I was sharing my research interests in studying how people change. One of the Citi executives asked if I would be interested in joining the bank as a consultant to help them change their culture, their staff and their processes. Not knowing anything about banking, I said, “Sure.” That answer has been my career trajectory from the beginning. “Why not? Let’s see what consulting is all about.”

So, I joined Citibank, first as a consultant and then as an Assistant Vice President. I became involved in new technologies that were being launched, from ATMs to Bank by Personal Computer. From there I was recruited to become Senior Vice President of Poughkeepsie Savings Bank and then Executive Vice President of First National Bank of Highland which we merged into M&T Bank.

Sharing my journey with the reader is important. There was no straight line from where I was to where I was going. But I was always listening, watching, and thinking about what I liked to do and where I could do it best. I knew I really liked businesses that were changing. I liked vacuums where people were uncertain how to get things done. When the changes were coming quickly, I was agile, and people seemed comfortable following my lead. In the process, I was also learning about my shortcomings, business areas that I didn’t like, and things that bored me.

After fourteen years in banking, I was recruited to the healthcare arena by a former bank colleague. Montefiore Medical Center was a great place for me to take my skills as an anthropologist and a business change executive and apply them. Healthcare was adapting to new payment methods and models. Managed care was challenging the old ways in which doctors took care of patients and received payment for their services. I spent seven years at two hospitals as an executive, helping them adapt to new business environments.

Then in 2002, after 9/11, I decided it was time to venture out on my own as an entrepreneur. I knew I was skilled at helping organizations change. Could I launch a business and do the same as a consultant? My PR guru, John Rosica, listened to my story and said: “Andi, you are a corporate anthropologist who helps organizations change.” That became my brand positioning, captured my strategy, and defined my target audience. In some ways, it defined who I was, not just what I did.

For over 20 years now, I have been working with all types of companies, from a billion dollars in sales to hundreds of million dollars in size to startups in the early stages of their growth. They span industries and are located across the globe and have prepared me quite well to address the question in this interview about scaling a business. I have worked with companies that reached $25 million in annual revenue and wanted to grow to $100 million, as well as $350 million engineering firms wanting to get to a billion in sales. Another one celebrated getting to the $10 million mark and dreamed of how to capitalize on its single product and double its size.

Clients came from all different places — speaking engagements, referrals, marketing, workshops and conversations in elevators. I learned quickly how people had needs, feared changes and could use a little help from a corporate anthropologist. My first award-winning book, “On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights,” featured eight client stories. They had come to SAMC stuck or stalled and needed a fresh perspective to see what was all around them.

My second book, “Rethink: Smashing the Myths of Women in Business,” which also won an award — the Axiom 2022 Bronze Best Book award in the Women in Business category — came about from a program my husband and I launched at Washington University in St. Louis. Called the “Simon Initiative for Entrepreneurship,” we realized that many aspiring women entrepreneurs were searching for role models who could inspire them. This has led us to focus on women’s leadership and women’s entrepreneurship in our own business.

Today, we have expanded our services to include executive coaching, leadership academies and personal development programs. Change, as we have learned so well, is exciting for us while often painful for others. Even when a company and its staff know they must adapt to new times, the unknown and the unfamiliar are terrifying for people. Our job is to help organizations embrace change, adapt to fast-changing times, and sustain their personal and professional growth despite the hurdles often before them.

What’s the most impactful initiative you’ve led that you’re particularly proud of?

When I became Executive Vice President of First National Bank of Highland, its leader was a fine CEO who needed an operational focus to restore structure, systems, processes and purpose to the bank. Before I joined it, the bank had acquired another bank, resulting in thousands of customers’ personal checks being stuck in limbo because their accounts had not been properly migrated over to the new system. Their loans were being managed on yellow pads and it was not clear what loans had been paid or when. It was an institution shackled by its old operating system, and the bank examiners insisted we build a new one in record time, which we did, somehow. Most disturbing to me was the high turnover of tellers. The cleaning people would bring me black bags with coins in them — the joke was that it took two weeks to train a teller, then two weeks for them to steal and leave.

However, the years I spent at Highland were transformative. I had to rebuild systems, create trust, hire new staff, and develop them…and do it all fast. This is where I learned that great leaders don’t always have the answers. Neither do they have to. But if you engage with the people you are leading, together you can transform anything for the better. The people I was leading actually knew what had to be done. They just needed the resources and resolve to get it done.

Sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a mistake you’ve made and the lesson you took away from it?

Life is certainly a series of lessons learned as we test and try new ideas to solve complex problems. One mistake I made was to hire a speaking coach to help me take my public speaking to the next level and get the compensation for the talks that I thought I warranted. I was referred to someone who made his living as a keynote and motivational speaker. I was neither. I was an edutainment speaker, bringing new insights to my audience. The “specialist” and I worked together for several months until it was time for me to do some trial recordings. I traveled to North Carolina to his recording studio. It was awful. What he was trying to get me to do simply did not fit who I was and what I did.

Today, I have done over 500 speaking engagements, workshops and virtual talks. It wasn’t that I was not a competent speaker. I just wasn’t his type of speaker. That was the end of our relationship.

I did learn a great deal about how I did not want to speak. And I also learned how to better select a coach for me. Most of all, I learned that it is ok to try something and not succeed at it. Just be smart. Stop before you flop. Testing is one thing. Assuming you can master something you are not made to do is quite another. Best to avoid.

How has mentorship played a role in your career, whether receiving mentorship or offering it to others?

As a woman moving up the ladder in academia and then in corporate life, I always had the good fortune to have someone see the potential in me and play a mentoring or sponsorship role. Some were men and others were women. But what I realized over the years was that I rarely had to go find someone to support me, educate me and even coach me. They just seemed to sit me down and have a conversation about something. It took some time before I began to thank those mentors intentionally. That is when I realized that they were not mentoring me in a formal role. Rather, they were teaming up with me to help us both achieve better results and positions in the organization.

One professor was particularly supportive of my academic ambitions and coached me on how to guide my publications and career trajectory. In banking, I had several men who became my go-to mentors as I progressed up my positions of responsibility. In healthcare, I sought out people to guide me in my skill development. And when I launched my business, my PR team was particularly helpful in crafting my story, promoting it and building the firm during its early stages.

I have been a mentor to several people over the past five years. Some are very clever creators and need a hand with the business side of their efforts. Others are in positions where they need someone to vent to, share ideas with and get some perspective.

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?

As I reflect on my career and the development of my own leadership styles, I realized that no single person was a role model in my way of leading others. I learned quite early that leaders need followers to successfully reach a destination or to complete projects. My staff was always chosen carefully, with values that I thought would enable us, the team, to work best together. Leading by way of a “command and control” top-down model was simply not acceptable to me. Empowering others, helping them perform their best and enabling them to test and take risks, always seemed to be the most effective way to lead my teams. Since I was often leading organizations through changing business environments, I knew that results had to come through collaboration, not competition.

Two people who influenced my own style were from banking and from academia. The banking executive was a maverick and fit the style emerging from bank deregulation. He was very difficult to read but very focused on what had to be done through collaboration. The other was a woman at Ramapo University whom I admired. She mentored me and demonstrated good leadership through her own efforts to build a young team at a new institution.

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.

As a business owner, a consultant, an anthropologist and someone married to a very successful serial entrepreneur, I think these are the 5 most important, positive things you should know and do if you want to successfully scale your business:

1. Strategy, strategy, strategy. Regardless of the size of your business, take the time to assess your business strategy. Learn about red oceans where you are competing and “Blue Oceans” where you are creating. Are you trying to be just like other companies, imitating them or competing with them? If you want to grow, and scale for the future, make sure you know your strategy and are living it. It is not a good business model just to be better than the rest. It is much more important to make sure you are meeting consumers’ unmet needs and attracting non-users who will sustain your growth. Be a market creator.

We are trained practitioners in Blue Ocean Strategy. Having worked with too many companies trying to be a little better than the others and hoping their customer service is a differentiator, we caution our clients and the reader to think about your business from the outside in. What is the market, and is it growing so that you can create a new market space fulfilling unmet needs with innovative solutions?

One example from our clients is a college in New Jersey which we worked with for five years. It had shrunk and was almost out of business. Its new president knew that the geographic market was too small to sustain it, and the dorms were inadequate for growth. We worked with the leadership team to identify a business community that would embrace new training and development programs which the university could provide to that community, even before today’s virtual training programs had been developed.

This meant a particular kind of scaling for new market space. There were clear unmet needs and demand was there, awaiting the university’s innovative training. The faculty was ready to create new programs, but the university would also need to hire new faculty. Rather than hire these full-time, they found that contract faculty were more flexible and better suited for the business market. They also needed new systems, processes, and products.

Finally came the need to create and capture new demand. This required new marketing and business development skills.

By the end of our work with the university, they had tripled their student base and were capitalizing on growing demand and enthusiastic support from the new markets they were opening.

2. Hire the right people, train, and prepare them for the future. If you are going to grow your business, you need to recognize that people are your most important asset. Think about what type of person you want on your team, both short and long-term. Do you want someone with attention to detail, someone who stretches the bounds of your thinking, a creative person, or a compliant one?

Jim Collins, a great author on leadership, said, “…make sure you have the right people on the business and get the wrong people off the bus.” Over the long haul, I have learned that once hired, it is difficult to fire, and those who don’t know how to do a job often slow down or kill the scaling process.

Case in point: we had a client with a $10 million travel pillow company. He wanted to grow to $100 million dollars, which was going to be a challenge. It was a business with one main product and some smaller ancillary products. He had started his business with his wife, her sister and two good friends. Sounded like a great way to build a family firm.

The challenge was that the skills his business needed were not the skills these people brought to the organization. He needed great marketing and business development staff who could expand his distribution outlets beyond the airport newsstands. He wanted an online market, which we created for him in our consulting role. Growth required new products that could capture unmet needs rather than be so far out there that they solved no one’s needs. He was an entrepreneur and very proud of what he had created. However, staffing for the future was going to require some hard conversations with family and friends, or the pain of over-staffing to retain those currently working there while he found others to do what the business needed for growth.

Our coaching work with him went in circles; he would agree he had to make some hard moves, which his family and friends would then negate. The advice we offered him, and your readers, was to be focused and comfortable with interpersonal conflict. We suggested, and he pursued, a slower growth strategy, either replacing his current family and friends or getting them to realize that they were not the right solution for growing his company.

3. Don’t let the ideas alone drive the business. There are several things to pay attention to as you scale your business. As we work with entrepreneurs, we have learned quickly how they love their ideas, how hope and passion are their guiding north star, and how they get frustrated when staff or investors refocus them on processes and data. Don’t fall into the love trap where each new idea is the best one. Of course, entrepreneurs and business owners are proud of their ideas. To capture markets and sustain their growth, however, they need to also focus on the business model itself. Are they developing processes and systems to scale for future business? Are they designing data capture systems and analyzing the information and insights to ensure they are hitting the targets needed to support their investments? How are they evaluating different ideas, mergers, acquisitions, new products, and so forth, to ensure they have the right ones coming together at the right time? Even as they look at an exit strategy, are they preparing the company so it is a desired acquisition?

One company we worked with in the event marketing business had a founder and leader caught in his own ideas. He was a creative president and proud of his ability to find new solutions and new clients. The only problem was that he would rarely empower his staff and often second-guessed them or micro-managed them. They came to us for relief. Could we help him step back, take on a different role, and trust that they could grow and scale the business with him? If this is you or someone you know, pause, step back yourself, and think about a new way to grow your business.

People live the story in their mind’s eyes. We are story creators. That story that this individual lived was one in which he was the hero, the inventor and the talented event planner, and he believed it was his creativity that clients were buying. He might have been right. But his story was not scalable. How could he grow if he was the only one with the talent and the time to grow it?

What we worked on was helping him develop delegation and accountability processes that would enable him to create, delegate, coach, and celebrate with his team, but together. They, in turn, had to take charge of each client project and deliver excellent results for the company. The president also had to start to think of this as a company, not a solo-preneur’s company with him leading and everyone watching. Slowly the transformation took hold, and he redefined his own role, scaling the jobs of the others, and adding necessary staff to support their growth.

He also realized the need for a COO to run the business. His marketing team was bringing in new clients. His operations needed to make sure he could deliver on their expectations. Changing his story was the most difficult part until it finally clicked. As we watched the results come in and his folks share their success, it became apparent that growing up was hard to do, but very doable.

4. Know what funding you need to scale for growth? The lack of available funds can slow down or even kill a business, much less the scaling process. What do you need and when? It is difficult to grow quickly if you need to closely watch your cash flow. You need to think about your sources of funds. How knowledgeable are you about different sources and uses of capital? Think about what you need and consider available sources. Line them up before you start to scale so that future growth is not inhibited by a lack of funding.

We often find that the creative leadership of a company lacks the financial expertise needed to run and grow the company. Think carefully about your strengths and limitations, pleasures, and pain points. Everything is in the numbers. Become fluent in the financial data early and stick close to them as you grow. It is not a sidebar to scaling a company. It is essential for you to build off the foundation.

One client funded their business through friends and family. Then they got bank financing as the revenue grew and the operations were being managed carefully. But they were ready to make an acquisition and found themselves frustrated. They weren’t in over their heads, but they knew they needed better counsel and advisors to trust.

Our recommendation was to interview those advisors and their clients. If you are uncertain of the financial requirements of your growth plans, make sure you learn your options fast. You don’t want to find yourself giving away too much of the company if you don’t have to. And you certainly don’t want to find yourself without the right investment partners to sustain your growth over time.

5. Timing and pacing for growth. Develop realistic time frames. Figure out what is a realistic goal. Then work backward to determine the viability of the goal. Often you will have to adjust that scaling goal as you begin to understand the deliverables at each stage and the complexity to accomplish the goal.

We had one $350 million engineering firm as a client. They wanted to grow to a billion dollars in annual revenue. This was going to be a challenge. As we worked with them to create a visualization of their goal, they realized that the resources it took to get to and manage a company of that size were far beyond what they had available. To triple in size required multiples of staffing, systems, and funding. We weren’t even sure why they thought they could grow to that size in the five years they set forth as their goal. They did not have a culture that could easily integrate new companies or new staff without intentional work in this area. And while they had a robust customer base that was growing, a more realistic 10–12% growth per year might be more manageable.

Our counsel with them was about creating a backward plan and testing their assumptions. Backward planning is very useful. You take your aspirational goal with all its details and backward plan when you will have accomplished each part of the business to get it to where you want it to go. While I am not sure where this client is now, they agreed that dashing off to great growth and scalability was not realistic until they put into place additional foundation and processes, as well as the people to support the growth plans.

Can you share a few of the mistakes that companies make when they try to scale a business? What would you suggest addressing those errors?

The recurring mistakes we have seen include (but are not limited to):

1. The company thinks its current skills are the right ones for scaling its business.

2. The why’s and how’s are missing in their strategy.

3. They are thinking inside out, not outside in. Growth is about serving others, not building the factory.

4. They are growing to compete not create. More of the same, cheaper, is not a good strategy for today, and nor was it ever the best strategy. Scaling a company should be associated with creating new markets. Before you try to grow, look for adding value innovative. These creative solutions can propel a company forward.

Before you prepare to scale your business, take some time to assess where you are today, the skills you have for growth, and the reasons why you want to grow. If you are going to “live this story” that is in your mind about how big this company can become, make sure you are not making up a myth about it. Is the future image of your company realistic? Can you realize scale through organic growth, or do you need to acquire other companies? What are your skills as a leader in more complex organizations? Will you continue to roll up your sleeves and do many tasks or will you become a “big picture” leader who can set a vision and inspire others to achieve it? What skills and talent do you need in your staff, your teams, and your outside supporters? This is not a job for one person. Be brave and bold to think beyond “I” and consider the “we” who are needed to make your company the one you want it to become.

Scaling includes bringing new people into the organization. How can a company preserve its company culture and ethos when new people are brought in?

Since we spend a great deal of time with clients assessing and building their cultures, this question is particularly important. Far too often, people don’t know what their current culture is. They are unclear about what the new people do every day and how their values, beliefs and behaviors will fit or not fit with the existing culture. Perhaps they might bring in new ideas and methods. Perhaps the old ways of doing things are ready to be changed. When you are scaling an organization, you should begin with an assessment of your culture so you know what you want to preserve, change, eliminate or create. Try using www.ocai-online.com, a culture assessment tool we frequently use.

If you decide that you do know your current culture (the way you do things today) and want to preserve it, develop a long-term culture program to introduce and embed new hires into the company. It is not sufficient to onboard someone for a few days and hope they get it. It will take time for people to understand what you say and what people actually do.

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?

As our business grew, as did those of our clients, we realized three things:

1. When I was an executive in banking, I watched as procedures were aborted as people sought to get things done more quickly and in their own ways. Their networks were powerful influencers of culture and behaviors. Consequently, I put into place rehearsal times for new procedures to become “the way we do things,” instead of something in a book. And as new employees came into a department, I set them up with a procedure maven whose job it was to instill the procedures and the knowledge into the new hire. New employees seek those pearls of wisdom and want to know “how do we do this here?” If I ignored the gap, the individual filled it in on their own.

2. In healthcare, I embraced a “checklist” process program. Quality in healthcare delivery can easily be undermined when well-designed processes are ignored. Whether it is having nurses observe the patient rooms in order to avoid falls, or having physicians check for medicine allergies before prescribing something to a patient, the errors of the past, and the proper procedures for the present must become part of the daily actions, those personal habits and shared agreed-upon behaviors. Mentoring is one method that I used. Repetition of key values and behaviors was essential. Intentionally building the culture and behaviors leadership expects starts from the top and must ripple down through the entire organization or those procedures are easily uprooted.

3. For our clients, as they shifted from family firms where everyone did things their own way, to scaling business operations, we worked closely with management to develop procedures based on what people were going to be doing — not what management imagined they were doing. If procedures were designed too far from the reality of getting work done, they were quickly placed on the bookshelf for future reference when something went wrong. Engagement with staff to create procedures became a very valuable way to ensure the new processes were doable and understandable. We also became great fans of putting checklists onto iPads so staff could record the actions against the expected results.

What software or tools do you recommend to help onboard new hires?

Since I am not using any onboarding software and have not been working with clients on this topic, I would suggest the reader look at the evaluations on the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). The link is here.

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.

The movement that I am most closely involved with is one to change the place of women across the globe. As a vice-chair of the Women Business Collaborative, we focus on enabling women, women of color, LGBTQ, and women from all backgrounds to realize their potential in our society. Both women and men will do better together, and our future will be a richer one, through better creativity, communication, collaboration and caring. Movements only happen if “we” can see the greater benefits of collaboration over individual achievements.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

On our websites: www.Andisimon.com and on www.simonassociates.net

On our podcast: On the Brink with Andi Simon (www.andisimon.com/podcast)

Our handles: https://twitter.com/simonandi; linkedin.com/in/andisimon; https://www.facebook.com/SimonAssociatesManagementConsultants

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.