All tagged gazelle

Be More Gazelle - How to grow your business at speed...

A week today I attended an event called Be More Gazelle - How to grow your business at speed...

I’ll start with a confession… before this event I had no idea what a Gazelle was. Obviously I know it's a kind of deer like mammal but in business terms, not a clue! It turns out I probably should have done because it’s exactly the kind of companies I work with. According to The FT it's an extremely fast growing company (20% + YOY) that maintains consistent momentum. 

 

Are you a secret Gazelle? I can’t be the only person that doesn’t know what one is?!

 

The event was run by Upstream – a fab initiative that's aiming to redress the silicon roundabout East-West imbalance and make Hammersmith and Fulham the best place to do business in Europe. What an exciting vision! Are you in the West of London? Look it up and get involved. There were far too many business advisors there and not enough actual businesses and I'd love to feel as though I was part of a growing and thriving community of great businesses. 

The 5 things your business can't live without...

OK so this is the second time I’ve written about this but the more clients I work with and the more I learn, the more I think this message bears repeating. For all the advice there is out there about how to run a business, there are really only 5 very basic things that every business needs to do well. And yet, I find very few businesses that have all of these nailed.

I’ve worked in, and with, businesses of all sizes. From multi billion pound blue chips that exist in hundreds of countries to kitchen table enterprises that are just getting off the ground and literally everything in between. And only a handful have all 5 of these things down pat. They all do some of these things, and some of them do all of them to some extent but none do all of them, all of the time.

I thought when I started working with small businesses and start ups that they would be hugely different to the big corporates. And they are, massively different –