80% of startup businesses fail in the first 5 years. Of the 20% that ‘survive’, another 80% of those will fail in the next 5 years. That means that only 4 in 100 new businesses will make it beyond 10 years. No entrepreneur starts a business thinking that he or she is going to fail. Every one of them believes that they are going to be in the 4%. The same is true of people who purchase existing businesses or those who take positions as CEO’s of established companies. So how do you make sure that you are in the 4%?

James Fischer, author of ”Navigating the Growth Curve”, spent over a decade researching over 650 companies of 500 employees or less. His goal was to find out if there were commonalities between those companies that made it and those that did not. In brief, what he found was that:

• There are 7 Stages of Growth that companies go through that are determined by the number of employees,
• There are 27 Challenges that every company faces at some point in their existence, and
• There are Non-Negotiable Rules that must be followed and satisfied if a company is to move SUCCESSFULLY from their present stage of growth to the next.

From his research Fischer, developed a Growth Curve ‘Model’ that, if followed, will help:

• A business predict the challenges they will be facing down the road as their company grows
• A CEO know what kind of leadership style they will need to exhibit during various stages of growth
• The company get focused on doing the right things at the right time

This model has recently been made available to Price Associates through our relationship with TTI Success Insights and we are currently working with several companies to help them work through their growth challenges.

If you are a leader in a company that is either struggling to grow or are experiencing the chaos of rapid growth and would like to talk about this model further, give me a call and I’ll be happy to explain the benefits of the model to you further.