Blue Monarch Management

Tag: Growth

  • Our Direction in Sustainability

    Our Direction in Sustainability

    July 27, 2024 marked the sixth anniversary of Blue Monarch Management. When I first launched Blue Monarch Management in 2018, my inspiration came initially from wanting to surround myself with smarter, principled management consultants who were driven by something larger than power and profit, with purpose that could grow beyond themselves and frankly, who could help me to step up my own game into a larger world of building companies and communities. I also saw the opportunity to move beyond simple project delivery with clients – many of whom did not want to work with consultants – to one where the work would be pulled to us by clients aspiring to change, thrive, and be different – to lead. Over the last couple of years, we started to shed the textbook management consulting practices in favour of introducing new language and values around building sustainable companies and communities while we walk alongside our clients, helping them to navigate their own development journeys.  In a world where 20% of new businesses fail in their first year and a mere 50% survive to celebrate their fifth birthday, I am incredibly proud  to arrive at this milestone anniversary with a team who possesses the courage to  be different.

    Sustainability is a complex concept that has implications and applications for businesses and society. Sustainability can be understood as the ability to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, and as a balance and integration of the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of human activities and outcomes. As a former colleague rightly described it, we are future-proofing ourselves and developing the experience to guide our clients towards long-term viability through sustainable business practices that start today.

    I believe sustainability can also be seen as a strategic advantage and a moral obligation for businesses that want to create value and impact for themselves and their stakeholders, and who want to contribute to the global goals and challenges. We often work with our clients early in our engagements to help them connect their purpose to more globally-recognized needs and priorities, such as “solving world hunger”. Sustainability has both costs and benefits, which can be direct or indirect, tangible or intangible, short-term or long-term, and which require a holistic and long-term perspective and assessment.

    The research is certainly mixed around whether “sustainable companies” are more profitable – though that is only one dimension of long-term viability, and in my opinion, no longer the most important way to measure the impact companies have on the world around them.

    We have begun to shift our recruitment practices to bring on management consultants with high acumen, training, and experience around the dimensions of governance, social impact, and the environment – while still knowing how to interpret the construct, health, and performance of a company. I am pleased to see a selfless culture building in our organization centered around how to do right in the world, and demonstrated repeatedly by small acts of kindness, a sense of fun and play, and a natural curiosity around the work of our clients and partners. We are intentionally upgrading our language to align with the needs of our community, clients, and network stakeholders, and  we are learning from each other.

    Sustainability for Blue Monarch Management will intentionally encompass the dimensions of ESG (environment, social, governance), corporate social responsibility, and long-term viability for us, and importantly also as part of our core playbook working with clients who are trying to grow and compete in world markets. We have embarked on a journey to create awesome career pathways for those who work closely with us. Careers of significance, learning, empowerment, autonomy, wealth, and impact. With all the ego I can muster, we must be leaders in authentically applying high moral and ethical standards to the growth and transformation of competitive businesses and communities. We will advance our development around tightening our ecological footprint; improving our human development and our happiness indices; and building our social capital – all core measures of sustainability. Continuing to shape Blue Monarch Management around these dimensions will award us the street credit to advise in today’s increasingly disruptive and competitive world.

    The first six years introduced powerful learnings about the growth and development of Blue Monarch Management. We have learned some important lessons from our own successes and failures, and as a firm staffed with assertive, quiet, thoughtful leaders who read, engage, ask tough questions, and work closely to understand our clients, we have learned much that will help to shape the growth and navigate complex change with inspiring companies and communities in the next leg of our journey.

    About

    Jeff Peterson is the Founder and CEO of Blue Monarch Management and is a professional Management Consultant specializing in Strategy, Governance, and Organizational Development for companies designing and driving transformational investments.

  • Everybody Is Talking About Scaling. Should We Be Talking About It?

    Everybody Is Talking About Scaling. Should We Be Talking About It?

    Growth and scaling are two terms that are often used interchangeably in the context of business development, but they have different meanings and implications. Both may be important objectives for companies of any size, but they require different strategies and techniques, and those practices will certainly drive different outcomes, benefits, and risks.

    The (Traditional Slow) Growth Operating Model

    Growth, defined for this discussion, refers to increasing the revenue or market share of a business while ramping up assets and resources that help to build revenue streams. Companies that are built around a ‘growth’ operating model can add much cost to generate greater revenue. Some business model examples you might recognize as slow growth include medical practices, traditional post-secondary education models, consulting and other professional firms that operate through a trade-time-for-money model, many resource-intensive industries, and business models that have manual efforts by staff and contractors and/or high knowledge elements. Many traditional bricks-and-mortar operations that require optimization of time and space with people are also tied to this form of a traditional growth model.

    The Scaling Model

    Scaling refers to increasing the efficiency or profitability of a business that can lead to rapid growth. Companies that invest in scaling practices may invest smartly in leadership, systems, and culture development to avoid introducing ongoing costs while still driving revenue growth. Operating profits in a scaling company may have potential to generate higher free cash for reinvestment and accelerated growth. Scaling is the process of growing a business to meet increasing demand, reach new markets, and achieve greater impact. It’s not just about growing bigger, but also about growing smarter, faster, and more efficiently. Scaling requires a strategic vision, a flexible mindset, and a willingness to innovate and experiment. Scaling also involves overcoming various challenges and risks, such as managing complexity, maintaining quality, ensuring alignment, and fostering culture.

    True scalability involves adding revenue at a much greater rate than costs, ensuring efficient expansion without compromising quality or profitability.

    Scaling within medium or large-sized enterprise has been an area of professional interest since my days working within the  railroad industry. Following the 2008/2009 global financial crisis and further ongoing disruption in global commodity markets,  the ability to grow profit has depended increasingly on international market selection, cost management, productivity, demand, and capacity. These optimization investment trends are pervasive in resource and asset intensive industries such as transportation, energy, mining, and manufacturing.

    We have also been working with a more entrepreneurial client base whose primary aspirations are to transform their companies repeatedly and iteratively through innovation, great positioning, and relationship management, while either entering or creating new markets facing incredible pressures and disruptive forces. These companies consistently aspire to chase high growth through relentless innovation in what they perceive as untapped opportunities to solve well-known business problems.

    Scaling a business is not a one-size-fits-all process. It depends on various factors, such as the type, stage, and industry of your business, the size and nature of your market, the preferences and expectations of your customers, and the availability and suitability of your resources and capabilities.

    Should you Scale?

    The strategy and business cases to scale an organization should ask and attempt to answer these and other questions first – all focused on answering ‘why’ first, before getting to ‘how’ and ‘when’.

    Strategic Thoughts

    • Do you think your  products, services  and operating model can create a sustainable competitive advantage for you? What is your revenue and profit potential? What problems can you solve?
    • What market(s) should you select and is there a strong trend that will help you to quickly build momentum for profitable and fast growth?
    • Why do you want to grow? Are you (perhaps naively) chasing the “Unicorn” dream to be “the next…”?
    • Have others paved the way before you or do you have potential to be a market leader?
    • Do your plans follow rigorous business fundamentals or are you pursuing some ‘implied growth imperative’?
    • What happens if you fail and where are your potential failure points? How can you manage those risks?

    Practical Matters

    • How will you resource your rapid growth with people, funds, and time and what value are you potentially negotiating away?
    • Can you establish sufficient working capital to build control and stability into your growth?
    • What investments in projects and initiatives should you make and when?
    • Will you create ongoing dependencies on investors for revenue and funds to continue your operations?
    • How will you establish and build the right relationships with banks and other financial institutions to power your growth and manage sustainable operations and risk?
    • What leadership structures and cultures will  you need to develop…and when…to power your growth?

    Ethics and Morality: Sustainability Considerations

    • What ethics and morality principles should you follow around staffing and labour practices, particularly in higher risk / higher rewards growth scenarios?
    • What are your obligations to your people as your growth potentially outpaces your systems, infrastructure, and culture development?
    • What are your obligations to your communities as you develop and position your products and services in untapped markets?

    Conclusion

    The nature of growth, positioning, and scaling companies will be the topic of a series of posts by Blue Monarch Management over the coming weeks. We will continue to develop narratives around investment in systems, people, leadership, culture, and strategic analysis.

    Jeff Peterson is the Founder and CEO of Blue Monarch Management and is a professional Management Consultant specializing in Strategy, Governance, and Organizational Development for companies designing and driving transformational investments.

  • Avoiding the Stall

    Avoiding the Stall

    With the arrival of spring on the calendar, Albertans honor the tradition of waiting out Old Man Winter’s final tantrums as his dominance gives way to gentle spring rains and the rise of green chutes signalling the countdown to summer bliss. As my thoughts impatiently drift toward the pursuit of fair-weather pastimes, I was inspired to prepare a brisket for smoking just as soon as the late March snow drifts make their final retreat. Always eager to find an opportunity to leverage a metaphor into my writing, it occurred to me that my brisket project shared certain attributes with my experience managing businesses through rapid growth and change.

    Our metaphor centers around a phenomenon experienced by barbeque pit bosses called “the stall.” This refers to the eight to twelve-hour mark of a low and slow smoking process when the internal temperature of the meat reaches 165 degrees Fahrenheit. At this point, no matter how long you wait, the internal temperature refuses to rise, and untended, our precious brisket would shrivel into a dried-out, inedible hunk of carbon before it reaches the target temperature of 205 degrees.

    Just as our seasoned pit boss would intervene by wrapping the brisket in butcher paper to prevent evaporation and allow the cooking process to continue, a technique known as the “Texas crutch,” CEOs who are managing “the stall” within their high-growth organizations are well served to intervene before organizational inertia sets the company into a highly destructive state of equilibrium.

    Organizations, particularly those experiencing rapid growth or scaling, will outgrow their founder’s ability to assert influence over the critical business aspects that drive the key outcomes. Sales conversion, service delivery, and margin efficiencies are highly vulnerable in these fast-growing companies.

    Founders need to ask themselves when, not if, their business growth will outpace their ability to maintain dominion over all aspects of the firm.

    Legacy managers, often promoted for their aptitude in previous non-management roles, are keen to establish relevance in the management hierarchy as the company achieves scale. Inevitably, this leads to the onset of agency issues and the development of silos within the firm. The inevitable outcome is that the system will move toward balance and its equilibrium point of productivity that resists any increase in demand on the system. In a business context, equilibrium is a terminal disease if left untreated.

    At this point, the CEO, often aware of the inertia building within the firm, begins mandating the management teams to intervene with the organizational deficiencies that are beginning to show up in the firm’s KPIs. These might include reduced service delivery metrics, diminishing sales conversion rates, or directional drift from the firm’s North Star principles and mandates.

    Frustrated by the management team’s inability or unwillingness to champion the cause and handicapped by their lack of bandwidth to direct the initiative personally, CEOs of these organizations, like our pit boss, are experiencing “the stall.”

    Understanding any problem is the key to overcoming it. There are tangible inputs into the business growth process that will result in often unexpected but otherwise predictable crisis developments.

    Understanding the business growth cycle and understanding when, not if, these emergent threats are likely to occur is key to circumventing the potential harm they represent to the business.

    As anyone who has had to shift the direction of a large organization would attest, the more entrenched systemic deficiency becomes, the more difficult and expensive it is to overcome. Shifting metaphors, big ships turn slowly, and an astute boat captain will invest early and often to build their organizational structure in a form that avoids the threat altogether. Still, leaders exhibiting head-down efforts to capture the maximum benefits of their rapidly growing firms often fail to look up long enough to see the iceberg coming. Even in late-stage cases, recognizing and diagnosing the causes of organizational inertia will enable executives to develop action plans to put the business back on course.

    Once a plan is developed, the impetus for success falls squarely on execution. It is here that corporations need to honestly assess their organizational structure requirements, specifically how they have changed since inception. In the next installment of the spring series, we will explore methods to remedy these naturally occurring bottlenecks and explore organizational structures designed to avoid them altogether.

    Neil Schmeichel is a management consultant at Blue Monarch Management in Calgary, Alberta. He is a 30-year veteran of the oilfield service industry and has cofounded two highly technical businesses with operations in Canada and the USA. Operational expertise gained over a career puts Neil in a unique position to execute his consulting mandate: to assist high-growth and scalable businesses in achieving sustainable value as a going concern and on both sides of M&A transactions.

  • Hobby or Full-Fledged Business.  Which one are you?

    Hobby or Full-Fledged Business.  Which one are you?

    In the dynamic world of entrepreneurship, the fine line between pursuing a passion as a hobby and transforming it into a thriving business often becomes blurred. Business owners, driven by their enthusiasm, sometimes struggle to recognize the crucial differences that can determine success or stagnation. 

    One primary reason for this oversight is the initial excitement that comes with pursuing a personal interest. Entrepreneurs, fueled by their love for a particular activity, may inadvertently overlook the meticulous planning and strategic approach essential for building a sustainable business. The transition from a casual hobbyist to a savvy business owner requires a shift in mindset – one that embraces not just the joy of the craft but also the complexities of running a successful venture.

    Additionally, the absence of a structured business plan contributes to the confusion. Many aspiring entrepreneurs fail to recognize the importance of outlining clear goals, understanding their target market, and establishing a solid financial foundation. Without a roadmap, businesses risk getting lost in the vast landscape of possibilities, hindering their potential for growth and profitability.

    Another factor at play is the reluctance to delegate tasks. Hobbyists often revel in the hands-on approach, personally managing every aspect of their passion project. However, the leap to a full-fledged business necessitates a willingness to entrust responsibilities to others, fostering collaboration and efficiency.

    To bridge this gap effectively, business owners must cultivate a keen awareness of their evolving role. Recognizing when to transition from a hobbyist’s mindset to that of a strategic leader is imperative. Seeking mentorship and embracing continuous learning can provide invaluable insights, helping entrepreneurs refine their business acumen and make informed decisions.

    In essence, the journey from hobby to successful business is an exhilarating transformation that demands a delicate balance between passion and pragmatism. By acknowledging the disparities and proactively addressing them, entrepreneurs can unlock the full potential of their endeavors and turn their once-beloved pastime into a flourishing enterprise.

    Rick Bennett, a global international leader with 20+ years’ experience, is renowned for driving transformative business strategies. His expertise in catalyzing growth and scaling Fortune 500 companies spans diverse regions, managing geographically diverse sales teams and overseeing hundreds of millions in revenue. Rick’s global impact extends from the Americas, Europe to Australia and even the polar regions. He champions people as the linchpin for sustainable change, excelling in forging profitable partnerships and enhancing operational efficiency in B2B and B2C realms. Rick’s passion for empowering Indigenous communities through scalable economic development earned him accolades, including “Best Workplace for Aboriginal Employees.” Recognized for strategic success, he is the visionary leader for purpose-driven growth and unparalleled performance.  

    Rick is a Management Consultant with Blue Monarch Management located in Calgary | Canada.  Bluemonarch.ca | Rick.Bennett@Bluemonarch.ca

  • Navigating the Growth Horizon: Tackling Critical Challenges Head-On

    Navigating the Growth Horizon: Tackling Critical Challenges Head-On

    In the dynamic landscape of business, growth-oriented companies constantly find themselves at the forefront of innovation, competition, and change.  I’ve had the privilege of being trusted by global Fortune 500 companies to scale market share faster than the competition, and it’s clear that while the path to success is exhilarating, it’s not without its challenges. My experience points to 6 critical issues facing growth-oriented companies today and how a proactive approach can transform hurdles into steppingstones. Let’s explore those challenges / opportunities. 

    1. Talent Acquisition and Retention: The Power of a Stellar Team.  In the race for growth, attracting and retaining top-tier talent is paramount. Companies must create an environment that fosters professional development, encourages creativity, and champions a strong company culture. By investing in their people, organizations can build a powerhouse team that propels them forward. 
    2. Market Expansion and Globalization: Seizing Opportunities Beyond Borders. While expanding into new markets offers immense growth potential, it also introduces complexities. Companies must navigate diverse regulatory landscapes, cultural nuances, and market dynamics. The “handshake” is different country to country. A comprehensive market entry strategy, paired with a global mindset, is essential to turning expansion challenges into triumphs. 
    3. Strategic Partnerships: Collaborate for Success. The business landscape is increasingly collaborative, and growth-oriented companies must recognize the power of strategic partnerships. Aligning with complementary businesses can accelerate growth, provide access to new markets, and enhance overall competitiveness. 
    4. Financial Management: Balancing Risk and Reward. Managing finances is a delicate dance, especially for companies in growth mode. Striking the right balance between investment and risk mitigation is crucial. A well-thought-out financial strategy ensures that growth is sustainable and doesn’t compromise the financial health of the organization. 
    5. Customer-Centric Approach: The Heart of Sustainable Growth. In an era where customer expectations are soaring, companies must prioritize a customer-centric approach. Understanding customer needs, providing exceptional service, and actively seeking feedback create a loyal customer base that serves as a foundation for sustainable growth. 
    6. Agility in the Face of Uncertainty: Navigating the Unknown. The business landscape is inherently unpredictable, and growth-oriented companies must embrace agility. An adaptable mindset allows organizations to pivot when necessary, turning challenges into opportunities and demonstrating resilience in the face of uncertainty. 

    Yes, the journey of growth for companies is exhilarating, filled with promise, and inevitably accompanied by challenges. My experience has shown that tackling these challenges head-on, with a proactive and positive mindset, can transform them into opportunities for unprecedented success.

    Here’s to conquering challenges and achieving unparalleled growth!

    Rick Bennett, a global international leader with 20+ years’ experience, is renowned for driving transformative business strategies. His expertise in catalyzing growth and scaling Fortune 500 companies spans diverse regions, managing geographically diverse sales teams and overseeing hundreds of millions in revenue. Rick’s global impact extends from the Americas, Europe to Australia and even the polar regions. He champions people as the linchpin for sustainable change, excelling in forging profitable partnerships and enhancing operational efficiency in B2B and B2C realms. Rick’s passion for empowering Indigenous communities through scalable economic development earned him accolades, including “Best Workplace for Aboriginal Employees.” Recognized for strategic success, he is the visionary leader for purpose-driven growth and unparalleled performance.  

    Rick is a Management Consultant with Blue Monarch Management located in Calgary | Canada.  Bluemonarch.ca | Rick.Bennett@Bluemonarch.ca